Within the I Miradas de Mujeres Festival whose purpose is to highlight the importance of the role played by women in the visual arts, the Blanca Soto Arte gallery is pleased to present the work of Argentine artist Mercedes Schamber.

 

Under the title de Corte, Mercedes Schamber, Posadas Misiones, 1972, shows his particular vision of memory. A series of drawings made exclusively in pencil on paper that mix and recreate their memories. Places once inhabited, family moments rescued from  photographs come together in a minimalist exhibition of constructed drawings  by cutting out the contours that make up the silhouette of each object and that, at the same time, generate a plot inside that gives them body and continuity. In Schamber's works, figure and background dialogue in a kind of conversation between presence and absence, an ambivalence between memory and oblivion.

 

In the words of the artist herself "with the  past we can  do many  things, remember it, forget it_31-5c7-81, improve it9 and bb3b-136bad5cf58d_ hasta  invent it”. She tries to trace that past in her drawings that combine figurative and abstract images. En ocasiones se remite a recuerdos conectados con  paisajes  donde  ha  vivido,_cc781905-5cde-3194 -bb3b-136bad5cf58d_ mientras que en otras trabaja con simples vestigios rescatados del olvido.  Viejas  fotos  le permiten _cc781905-5cde-3194 -bb3b-136bad5cf58d_evocar  la  memoria  familiar y reconstruir  los  moments  in  that  were_taken_cc781905-5cde-3193-bb3d5c5.

Especial mención requiere la serie Máquina de destruir subjetividades, obras realizadas mediante transferencias de documentos secretos utilizados por el ejército argentino,_cc781905-5cde-3194 -bb3b-136bad5cf58d_extraídos del libro “Nosotras, presas políticas” obra colectiva que reúne las historias de 112  prisioneras_cc781905-5cde-3194- bb3b-136bad5cf58d_who were imprisoned between 1974 and 1983 in various prisons in Argentina and who  shaped their prison routine as a survival strategy.

 

Collective and private memory are linked thanks to the synergies established between the works. In a montage where each drawing is organized in  based on the presence of another, thus writing small stories, like a whim and  pretentious_cc781905-5cde-3194-bb3b-138bad5cf5cf desire  de  generate meaning.