Pinnacle Grouse
Pinnacle Grouse (from the series Imaginary Beings – The Bestiary) Intervention on inkjet print and gold leaf (imitation), rotating motor, magnets.93x45x40 cm. 2023 CREDITS: Exhibition views of Pinnacle Grouse at Espaço Adães Bermudes, Alvito, Portugal, 2023.Documentation © Bruno Lopes
A Bao A Qu
A Bao A Qu (from the series Imaginary Beings – The Bestiary) Intervention on inkjet print and gold leaf (imitation), magnets.variable dimensions. 2023 The title of the exhibition is inspired by the literary work The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luís Borges. In it, the author lists and describes several fantastic creatures created over time through legends, myths, and religions. A Bao a Qu, who Carla Cabanas materializes, is a character of the book, an imaginary being, emotionally sensitive, who only reaches its full form when one travels a path of individual growth, traversing diverse stages to reach spiritual maturity. The sculpture A Bao A Qu is composed by photographs of the artist as a child, which act as a metaphor for her growth and are employed as material, rendering them visibility, and transferring them to a public setting. Installed in the laboratory’s centre, it is an allegory of the artist’s journey of personal growth as she aspires to reach the top of the tower and “to look out over the loveliest landscape in the world”. For this process to become conscious, the artist relives its stages, whose steps are winding and filled with scales. Sofia Marçal CREDITS: Exhibition views of A Bao A Qu at National Museum of Natural History and Science – Laboratory of Analytical Chemistry, Portugal, 2022.Documentation © Bruno Lopes
Imaginary Beings – Tent
Imaginary Beings – Tent Inkjet print, metal poles from a camping tent.Dimensions variable. 2022 Adopting part of the title from Jorge Luis Borges’ The book of imaginary beings, Seres imaginários, by Carla Cabanas (1979, Lisbon), is an exhibition-installation that opens the doors, on the one hand, to the private world of the artist’s memories and, on the other hand, to a speculative space of what (the constructions of) those memories might be. Continuing her investigations on the places of memory(s) and of photographic images, particularly family albums that she finds or acquires, in the construction of identity narratives, in Seres imaginários, Carla Cabanas uses exclusively and, for the first time, photographs of herself and of her family in which she intervenes to create new characters and new meanings. By offering us images from a family album in which, by its common humanity could be ours, this exhibition-installation moves from the realm of individual and untransmissible memories to the place of collective and shared memories. In both cases, it seems to be an almost impossible task to distinguish what is real from what is fictional. Luísa Santos CREDITS: Exhibition views of Seres Imaginários at Galeria Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisboa, Portugal, 2022.Documentation © Bruno Lopes With the support from Garantir Cultura Program by the Portuguese Republic.
Imaginary Beings – Grid
Previous Next Imaginary Beings – Grid Inkjet print and metallic grid. 102 x 142 x 9 cm, 70 x 74 x 7 cm, 66 x 69 x 7 cm. 2022 Adopting part of the title from Jorge Luis Borges’ The book of imaginary beings, Seres imaginários, by Carla Cabanas (1979, Lisbon), is an exhibition-installation that opens the doors, on the one hand, to the private world of the artist’s memories and, on the other hand, to a speculative space of what (the constructions of) those memories might be. Continuing her investigations on the places of memory(s) and of photographic images, particularly family albums that she finds or acquires, in the construction of identity narratives, in Seres imaginários, Carla Cabanas uses exclusively and, for the first time, photographs of herself and of her family in which she intervenes to create new characters and new meanings. By offering us images from a family album in which, by its common humanity could be ours, this exhibition-installation moves from the realm of individual and untransmissible memories to the place of collective and shared memories. In both cases, it seems to be an almost impossible task to distinguish what is real from what is fictional. Luísa Santos CREDITS: Exhibition views of Seres Imaginários at Galeria Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisboa, Portugal, 2022.Documentation © Bruno Lopes
Eclipse
Previous Next Eclipse Lambda print, light box, metal.30x45x14cm. 2017-2018 In the Eclipse series, initiated in 2017, I use a set of slides rescued from the Flea Market and that, apparently, portrait one specific family’s leisure and celebration moments. The images are presented in light boxes facing the wall, so that the viewer does not have a direct line of sight. I added to each light box a reflective surface, parallel to the image and mounted at a very short distance from it; this surface also fixates the box to the wall. CREDITS: Exhibition views of Mecânica da Ausência II at Galeria Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea, Lisboa, Portugal, 2017.Documentation © Pedro Reis and Carla Cabanas
Clouds Game
Previous Next Clouds Games Wet collodion photograph on glass mounted in light box.Variable measures. 2016 (…) The exhibition now at display has its starting point in the contemplation of two Jan van Goyen’s (1596-1656) paintings, which belong to Fundação Medeiros e Almeida Collection, “Good Weather” and “Bad Weather”— which are dominated, respectively, by white clouds and dark clouds. Artists Manuel Valente Alves and Carla Cabanas develop their projects interrogating the cosmological relationship of human subject with environment, as well as the way earth and skies constitute themselves as fundamental media for human self-understanding. (…) Carla Cabanas’s project, entitled “Clouds Game”, consists in 6 collodium photographic plaques of clouds, whose perception changes depending on the viewer point of view, underlining the simultaneous character, abstract and potentially figurative that clouds offer to the human gaze. (…) In the work of Carla Cabanas, on the other hand, the clouds polymorphism, as well as the fact that their apprehension varies upon the subject’s point of view, questions the instability of our perception; at the same time these images underline the abstract appearance of clouds concomitantly with its intense figurative potential as they appear to the human subject.The emphasis put in this destabilization is something that was overworked in baroque painting: in the clouds there has no linear perspective to look for, everything is equally distributed in the same space. This perceptive destabilization, technically possible here by the use of wet collodium with backlights, absorbs the viewer in an interpretative game, but also in a disquieting process about his or her place as a subject. In the twenties of last century, Alfred Stieglitz has photographed a series of clouds entitled ‘Equivalents’, exploring their symbolic potential (equivalents, as Rosalind Krauss pointed out, is in itself a symbolist term), but also recalling attention to the framing act, to the importance of the photographic gesture of cropping reality. Carla Cabanas’ clouds also suggest the game between the apparent abstraction and the latent, or subjective, figuration underlining the haziness that every photograph hides behind its supposed exactitude and realism. In a very specific way this images question the subject self-assurance as in the very process of contemplation one must think over the way he understands and apprehends the world.It is the poetic character of clouds, for its apparent abstract form as for its transitivity inscribed silently in human ecology that is convoked by the two artists. Margarida Medeiros Click here to read full text Click here to read full text CREDITS: Exhibition views of Andar nas Nuvens at Casa-Museu Medeiros e Almeida, Lisboa, Portugal, 2016.Documentation © Valter Ventura