Christina Mackie’s “People Powder” at Spazio Culturale Antonio Ratti
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Christina Mackie’s “People Powder” brings together three large works at Spazio Culturale Antonio Ratti, a former church in San Francesco in Como.“People Powder” is a term used to define the optimal passage of large masses crowds through public struc
Christina Mackie’s “People Powder” at Spazio Culturale Antonio Ratti
Christina Mackie’s “People Powder” brings together three large works at Spazio Culturale Antonio Ratti, a former church in San Francesco in Como.“People Powder” is a term used to define the optimal passage of large masses crowds through public structures such as subways, squares or stadiums. The exhibition surveys some extended interventions introducing an extensive sampling of practices and methodologies, compared to the exhibition the artist held in 2015 at the Tate Gallery in London.The exhibition has three components, including “Yellow Machine” — a complex filtering lattice, with a yellow metal section and a mechanical symbolical-filtering system.“It is precisely the themes of filtering, translation, reduction, and transaction between different formats and media at the centre of Mackie's work of recent years and traverse the entire exhibition at San Francesco. Presented together with the ‘Yellow Machines’ a group of computer animations, ‘Powder People,’ and a series of sculptures, ‘Plastics Thinking’ — created specifically for the minor aisle, the apse and the sacristy of the church — articulate the artist’s discourse on these themes,” the church says.The video animations of the exhibition use a highly sophisticated technology to give back an image of channelling, cleaning, and filtering processes whose abstract virtuality suggests a direct link with the dominant technologies used to control the contemporary human experience.Mackie suggests a formal and ideological continuity between futuristic research and everyday life. The church is transformed not only into an exhibition space but also into a laboratory in which the implicit and explicit connotations of the various materials, extrapolated from their function, are amplified.Born in 1956 in England and raised in Canada before relocating to London in the 1980s, Christina Mackie has exhibited extensively, with recent solo exhibitions including The Duveen Galleries, Tate Britain, (2015), Praxes, Berlin (2015), The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2014), Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2012), and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2012). A monograph on her work, supported by the Contemporary Art Society, UK, was published in 2015.An internationally celebrated artist, Mackie is best known for her composite sculptural installations, which unite disparate elements in a state of temporary synthesis. These elements circle subjects that have in the past included: “environment, ecology” (Xing, 2004), “pervasive data” (Filters, 2015), “surveillance” (Bloop, 1992), “the pleasure of privacy” (Foo, 1994), “analogue vs. Digital” (Petalhead, 2003), and “science and the transgenic” (Intron Image Project, 1999).http://www.blouinartinfo.com/ Founder: Louise Blouin Read more
