Blackout Jessica Mein

10/04/2012 - 05/05/2012

In her first solo exhibition at Galeria Leme, Jessica Mein presents a group of works on paper and a video animation, none of them previously shown in Brazil.

Mein’s oeuvre revolves around the clash between the use of digital technologies and mechanical means of reproduction, on one side, and the artist’s manual intervention, slow, painstaking and inevitably doomed to errors and accidents, on the other. The ambiguous relation between the two opposite polarities is emphasized by the very juxtaposition of the works: while her drawings and collages display a sort of automatic, impersonal look, suggesting they might be the result of an entirely mechanical process, the video (Blackout, 2012) maintains a handmade quality, which reveals the artist’s extremely slow and complex working method.

The drawings and collages take as a starting point Dubai’s landscape, full of power lines, posts and wires, but these visual references become, as it is usual in Mein’s work, quite quickly merely superficial. It could be said that the proliferation of wires as well as the deconstruction of the posts respond to Mein’s desire of emphasizing the omnipresence of these elements in the landscape, but it also evident that by multiplying and tirelessly repeating her drawings, the artist transforms an image she appropriated into a purely graphic sign, because she felt it belonged to her artistic universe.

The video animation Blackout is a short sequence of over 700 drawings, collages, frames and images produced and manipulated by the artist through obsessively repeating a few basic actions, such as folding, copying, cutting, mirroring. The resulting animation refrains from creating any narrative, becoming almost abstract, highlighting a new direction for Mein. The high voltage wires and cables, that in the drawings and collages become almost indecipherable in some cases also work here as central elements, both directly and, by being sliced out and subtracted from the image, allowing rapid visions of an imaginary sky to appear.

About the artist:

Jessica Mein (Born in 1975 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Lives and works between New York, Sao Paulo and Dubai)

Jessica Mein has had numerous exhibitions including solo shows at The Pavilion Downtown, Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Simon Preston Gallery, New York, USA; Gallery Pfeister, Denmark. Her work has also been seen in important group exhibitions including Museo Tamayo de Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico; The Street Files Biennial El Museo del Barrio, New York, USA. Jessica`s work can be seen in the current display of the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA and Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf, Germany.