Though the Eye of a Needle

Luz Adriana Vera                                                                                                                                                                                                             Anexo (2017)

Through the eye of a needle

by Cabeza curaduría

The work of Luz Adriana Vera (Pamplona, 1992) is build on questions and explorations regarding the sexualized body, a body whose sexualities are in continuous transit and redefinition. Her artwork explores the impact discourses of power have in the visibility, agency and dignity of those bodies, with a special emphasis in the Judeo-christian imprint and their rejection of a plural, lustful and material sexuality.

Through the eye of a needle is a project that retakes these concerns, while it builds itself as an exercise that searches for its own language that is in constant maturity and evolution. Vera proposes an installation, composed of sewing thread and unconsecrated hosts that consumes and invades the exhibition space. The result is a body that is simultaneously robust and delicate, inserted and inconvenient, for the rest of the bodies that try to pass through it, explore it, penetrate it, know it and judge it.

The combination and the use of the host—the body of Jesus Christ in catholic tradition— and sewing — the handmade technique that was taught to women to, within many things, prevent and control sexual desires of the idle body—materializes the tensions and oppressions that generate a discourse that invades the public space and suspends itself, vigilantly, over the bodies that transit in the space. The installation also includes a video performance, in which the host overlaps the body of the artist until it hides it completely, and incidentally, eliminates any identity feature that can be read as a manifestation of individuality and difference.

The thoroughness of Vera’s work— and this specific installation— reminds us, on one hand, of the carefulness, patience, time and perseverance that certain discourses of power need to consolidate their omnipresence. On the other hand, it highlights the importance of considering the work of the artist within the same frames that her body provides. Something that could seem like a visual eco of, for example, modernism and latin american slopes of abstraction for an unaware spectator, for Vera it’s about an answer located in her own body, pierced and molded by the operant discourses in the context of her consolidation as a subject. It’s the artist that thoroughly perforates the hosts to introduce the threads that connect the hosts with the others and with the gallery. It is the movement in space of the room, but also the space between Pamplona (her place of residence) and Bogotá what makes her proposal legible.

Through the eye of a needle is the result of a tripartite collaboration between the artist, the institution and the curatorial team. Espacio El Dorado invited De Cabeza curaduría to participate in the project and to work with the artist in the development of a new piece. During approximately six months, curators and the artist interchanged ideas, referenced artists and lectures, that always concerned Vera’s plastical proposal, which process only finished at the end of the work’s montage—thus allowing the participation of chance in the construction—.

Inauguration: Saturday October 21, 2017

Closes: December 22, 2017