Ana Maria Pacheco, Remember
Studio 3 Gallery is delighted to host Ana Maria Pacheco’s Remember (2022) during Autumn Term 2023. The exhibition is open to the public Monday – Friday, 10am – 4pm, in the Jarman Building, until 15 December. The private view, to which all are welcome, will be on Thursday 19 October at 6pm.
According to the art critic David Elliot:
Remember, Pacheco’s largest, most colourful, and most complicated installation to date, radiates a previously understated sensuality. Each of its strongly variegated groups of figures seems connected yet, confined in their own worlds, they also appear to exist outside them, on another plane. Although the title reflects the artist’s own remembrance, its central focus is a wider celebration of the energy, vitality, and cyclical nature of life against a continuing hubbub of violence, discord, and kindness. No old people are figured here and out if its twenty characters, three of them are young children.
As if in a film set, different scenes overlap and flash before the eye: young families huddle together, a group of gigantic young thugs are locked in a battle and, as if they hail from another world or time, a “chorus” of young women in white robes, with another veiled in blue, stand to one side, while yet another engages with a focal scene that is either just beginning to unfold or about to reach its climax: steadied by two “sympathisers”, a deathly-pale young man is either being helped down from, or being hoisted up onto a scaffold. This thinly-stretched matrix of a possible crucifixion provokes for the viewer an inevitable dilemma: should one grieve, rejoice – or do nothing? The observer is offered a vital choice: a red pill that could lead to life, it seems, or the blue one, a fast track to oblivion.
If only we could remember![1]
An interview with the artist talking at the Galway International Arts Festival is available here.
[1] This refers to a scene from the 1999 film, The Matrix, in which rebel leader Morpheus offers Neo, the protagonist, a choice between an uncertain future, living the often harsh truth of reality [the red pill] or the possibility of continuing to live in a beautiful, simulated prison, confined by ignorance.