Marina Vargas Spain, b. 1980
Guardián de Reliquia, 2023
Collage and mixed media on paper mounted on PVC.
204 x 109 x 4 cm.
These figures are mounted on containers that held important relics of important clan ancestors, who served as guardians. Ancestor worship is based on the relationship between offering and protection. Relic...
These figures are mounted on containers that held important relics of important clan ancestors, who served as guardians. Ancestor worship is based on the relationship between offering and protection.
Relic Guardian and Ekuk Mask are works that are part of the Anonymous Was a Woman 2024 project. This project takes its title from a phrase in Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own.‘I would venture to guess that Anonymous, who wrote so many unsigned poems, was often a woman’.
Anonymous Was a Woman is about storytelling: the secret and the revealed, through ritual and the symbolic. Because the spiritual is also political and reality is the playing field. These works arise from conceiving ‘image-as-story’. This project engages in a symbolic and mystical dialogue based on talismanic elements and objects of mediation such as the mask. Proposing new narratives and interpretations of the role of women in contemporary society. The works place special emphasis on process, through a stratographic reading of various layers of meaning. The images are conceived as a story and the drawing is taken as a diary-like writing in which time and accumulation play an imperative role in the execution of the work itself, making each piece unique and unrepeatable. Making it difficult for them to be conceived as serial works ...
These works start from the fragmentary with the intention of vindicating the ornament as a container of concept; the sign as the essence of being and the tattoo as a container of meaning and a way of inhabiting the world.
It is an opposite position to the essay by the architect Adolf Loos (1870-1993); ‘Ornament and Crime’. In this essay Loos introduced a sense of the ‘immorality’ of ornament, describing it as ‘degenerate’. He took Papuan tattoos as one of his examples. Loos says that, in the eyes of Western culture, the Papuan man has not evolved to the moral and civilised circumstances of modern man, who, if tattooed, would be a degenerate. These works are a counterposition to his theory and a direct link to ‘degenerate art’, an expression adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany.
Relic Guardian and Ekuk Mask are works that are part of the Anonymous Was a Woman 2024 project. This project takes its title from a phrase in Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own.‘I would venture to guess that Anonymous, who wrote so many unsigned poems, was often a woman’.
Anonymous Was a Woman is about storytelling: the secret and the revealed, through ritual and the symbolic. Because the spiritual is also political and reality is the playing field. These works arise from conceiving ‘image-as-story’. This project engages in a symbolic and mystical dialogue based on talismanic elements and objects of mediation such as the mask. Proposing new narratives and interpretations of the role of women in contemporary society. The works place special emphasis on process, through a stratographic reading of various layers of meaning. The images are conceived as a story and the drawing is taken as a diary-like writing in which time and accumulation play an imperative role in the execution of the work itself, making each piece unique and unrepeatable. Making it difficult for them to be conceived as serial works ...
These works start from the fragmentary with the intention of vindicating the ornament as a container of concept; the sign as the essence of being and the tattoo as a container of meaning and a way of inhabiting the world.
It is an opposite position to the essay by the architect Adolf Loos (1870-1993); ‘Ornament and Crime’. In this essay Loos introduced a sense of the ‘immorality’ of ornament, describing it as ‘degenerate’. He took Papuan tattoos as one of his examples. Loos says that, in the eyes of Western culture, the Papuan man has not evolved to the moral and civilised circumstances of modern man, who, if tattooed, would be a degenerate. These works are a counterposition to his theory and a direct link to ‘degenerate art’, an expression adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany.