Becoming Retina - Volverse Imagen
Solo Show - Site Specific Installation
Curator: Sofia Sanchez Borboa
Compound Yellow, Il Chicago.
September 9 - October 6, 2023
https://compoundyellow.com/exhibitions
https://chicagoreader.com/arts-culture/iridescent-illusions-maria-burundarena-compound-yellow/
Volverse Imagen- Becoming Retina presents María Burundarena’s latest work that explores finding pleasure and desire through the sense of discovery. Using photography, print media, and collage, she cuts out, reassembles, and condenses pieces of reality to play with multiple dimensions and invites the viewer to walk into several frozen moments that no longer exist in time and space. Photography becomes virtual by showing the viewer a fleeting moment, even if it looks like reality. The viewer becomes so entranced by it and its aura that they inevitably escape to the new reality to which the work takes them.
The exhibition is a continuation of the artist’s exploration of the boundaries of the image. By thinking of the retina as a surface and the surface as a retina that records images of imprinted memories blown up, she plays with the spatial sensation of the depth of an image. She further utilizes filters to interrogate the viewer’s relationship to the image and the ways in which they experience and understand their seeing. The ephemeral quality of her works stems from Burundarena’s interest in the relationships between time and abandonment in urban settings as a reminder that all we experience is but a fleeting memory. Although photography captures an embalmed moment in time, it will also fade away and be altered in our memories.
By using her personal photographic archive to surround the visitor in the gallery, Burundarena romanticizes a memory of what is lost, abandoned, and broken. Volverse Imagen- Becoming Retina is an installation of fragmented images that play with multiple dimensions, generating a visceral sensation of being inside an image. The viewer's immersion within a time limit of 30 seconds creates a sense of awe that goes beyond beauty and admiration and becomes an epiphany in which what is being observed is not a real image but a trace of reality.
