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Ideally, the gallery should appear as a white cube — a neutral space that allows the works of art to stand out without interferences from the architecture around them. However, Marcela Sinclair works specifically on the symbolic and material conditions of this space. For Mitema, her current exhibit at Mite, she has drawn the gallery her own works hang in, using the classical style of the architect’s sketch, as if she had designed the space herself.
In the past, Mite has housed within its walls, for example, a labyrinth of cardboard, photos and heavy curtains in Dudú Alcón Quintanilha’s installation at the beginning of this year. Now it’s almost empty. Nothing hangs from the ceiling and no movable object stands in the visitor’s way.
In flat wooden frames, Sinclair’s drawings occupy just a wall and a half. With precision, they reproduce the “discrete elements” of the room, as called by Fabio Kacero in the press release: a piece of furniture, windows, staircase, lights, beams, green ceiling, etc. Sinclair adds one thing that doesn’t exist in Mite’s physical space: She draws a rope, the kind used by movers, and shows it securing a cabinet — the single, heavy piece of furniture always sitting to the left of the entrance door to the gallery. Each successive drawing depicts the cabinet being hoisted upstairs. However, this gesture seems to point not so much to the movement, but to the fixity of the other objects, the “matter that preexists, the immensity of the world, in the contour lines of this room.”
Marcela Sinclair at Mite
A space, a hall, a room, Mite. It’s precisely Mite that can contain, with its own elements, a variety of works, gestures, all leaning on the same walls, standing on the same floor, the same piece of furniture. Sinclair works with this space as a source of meaning and values, turning its structure into the structure of the myth in the classical sense. “Mitema” (Mytheme) names the minimal, topical unit recognized in dissimilar narrations.
In Sinclair’s drawings of minimal and precise lines with watery colors, almost mirroring the space where they are hanging, everything appears depicted in a rational way. Explanations, though, are missing in the silence of the room. Representation denatures space, brings it into question, takes it to the edge of the abyss. And in this action, while Sinclair seems to talk strictly about space, she also modifies the past, present and future of whatever we had seen, can see, will see in the room.
Marcela Sinclair at Mite, with staircase
Marcela Sinclair
Mitema
Mite Galería
Santa Fe 2729, Buenos Aires, Argentina
