Artist Cecilia Mandrile at The CFPR Digital Print Studio
New York based artist Cecilia Mandrile has recently been working with CFPR Editions to produce a series of prints that explore differing approaches to printing and constructing image translucency. By using a UV printer the initial proofing process will develop multiple pass print methods and substrate layering options enabling the possibility of using white ink and novel substrate options (such as glassine paper). The breadth of the project may include around five separate editioned prints that are part of an ongoing series of works entitled Betweening.
The following text has been provided by the artist as a means to offer a contextual background to the work whilst illustrating the varying way's in which the artist revisits the same imagery through different processes.
Betweening Project Background
In the language of animation, to tween means
to have a change made between two objects. In this way, moving, morphing, transforming,
One becomes OneOther. Following this concept, Betweening, a traveling and
practice based research, focuses in the sense of incomplete-ness experienced
along that transition process.
Throughout this experience, I intended to
provide some understanding to my effortless adaptation and adoption of this
place of the world as another ‘home’: a place where the concept of displacement
is felt from inside every day, where doors do not close, they simply lean
against their frame; a context in which the refuge is made, unmade and remade
every day. The desert here is found as a ‘space’ where, even without an
apparent common language, communication could be profound.
This
research intends to unveil and articulate the discovering of ‘intersections’
between Latin American and Arab culture; with particular reference to the
poetic battle established in the encounters between Bedouins as well as among
Gauchos (the vanishing nomadic cattle herder of the Pampas). Based in the ‘word
war’ practiced between nomadic oral poets, both in South America and in the
Arab World, I intend to articulate the motivations and intentions of a form of
communication that is established between two other-nesses in a space of
blurred frontiers, where the nomads are forced to settle, and settled ones, to
become nomads.
Cecilia Mandrile, Betweening project exhibited 2012
Betweening
(The Desert Inside) is a series of narratives
of unsent photogram- postcards based in the dialogue of a surviving doll
carried along my last journeys and stones found during my traveling along two
deserts: Wadi Rum in Jordan, and Jujuy in Argentina.
These stone and doll based-photograms are
also the based for a series of “betweenoscopes” I am developing at the moment.
Allowing a dialogue between “settled” images and “passing” visitors, through
the spinning of these praxoniscope-based artifacts, still photograms recover
the lost sense of movement.
Cecilia Mandrile, Betweening project exhibited 2012
Fragments
from recent essays about this project:
From “A Life in Translation”, essay to be
published in The Translation of a Wound,
retrospective catalogue)
“Perhaps the most complete expression of the
guiding themes of Mandrile’s work can be found in the ongoing project Betweening (One Other) begun in 2007 to
explore the intersections between nomadic practices in different cultures.
Nomadic peoples are an anachronism in the modern world, which is structured by
fixing people in place and policing their movements by means of borders. Governments and settled
communities mistrust and fear nomads – the Bedouin in Israel and the Occupied
Territories, the Roma across Europe, Irish Travellers in the UK – regarding
them as definitively and dangerously ‘other’. The project began whilst Mandrile
was living and working in Jordan, where she was adopted by a local Bedouin
family, and she in turn adopted this place, where ‘home’ itself is something to
be constantly renegotiated and reconstructed, and where displacement is
internalised. For Mandrile this offered the opportunity to explore
intersections between Arab and Latin American cultures as represented in the
lives of the Bedouin and the Gauchos (the vanishing nomadic cattle herders of
the pampas). The work generated by this project takes several forms, comprising
photograms (featuring the dolls again) output as digital prints from which
various narratives are constructed. A series of unsent postcards suggest
failures to communicate and connect; indeed they complicate the idea of ‘home’
and where that might be, reminding us that the artist is now always ‘between’
places, and ‘home’ is now a concept anchored in the work. The postcards are
also elements of a praxinoscope (a simple animation device which Mandrile has
renamed a ‘betweenoscope’) in which the images are given the illusion of
movement.”
Gill Saunders
Senior Curator (Prints)
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
November 2012
From New
Heaven exhibition publication at Seton Art Gallery, New Haven University.
November/December 2012
“After a life changing illness, Mandrile’s
work has undergone a fundamental change. Her self-portrait now yields to
ghostly images, developed as photograms. Very much resembling the dolls she once
possessed, these images become in turn the base of a praxinoscope—which she
titled Betweenoscope. This
proto-cinema device is here a substitute for those sensorial aspects that the
dolls had. This ultimate attempt to animate the images only emphasizes their
immateriality. These are merely shadows of what once was; shadows of an
otherworldly light: the light of a New Heaven. “
Elvis
Fuentes (Curator, El Museo del Barrio, New York City)
