Acclaimed Brazilian artist Juliana Cerqueira Leite brings huge moulds to her latest London show© Courtesy TJ Boulting
In the centre of the TJ Boulting gallery, Brazilian artist Juliana Cerqueira Leite has cast two latex forms – made from a large mould of a set of stairs, covered with a wooden tunnel and lined with clay – into a sculpture.
The remainder of the space in the tunnel is intended to replicate the space occupied by Leite’s body as she walks up and down the staircase concerned, inspired by a century-old Marcel Duchamp painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, which in itself was based on a series of fast-sequence shots of a naked woman treading steps in 1887.
Her second solo show in the gallery also features multiple exposure photos which morph the body into a “cloud of motion” and, in her first attempt at video work, a collaboration with dancer Katie McGreevie, who has made a short sequence of movements relating to Muybridge’s photos and Pas de Deux, an award-winning dance film by Norman McLaren. The abiding techniques lie in composites and overlapping.
“The outcomes are largely unpredictable,” she admits. “I approach making from a position of limited control.
“When assigned a simple task such as ‘move up’ or ‘move down’, the body is an instrument, functioning at a similar level to the material it contends with.
“Clay, for instance, possesses the base organic qualities of memory, resistance and weight. I am sculpting from the inside out and working from subjective questions about our physical being.”
She compares the work to cross-fading music. “I wondered if I could produce a show that would ‘fade in’ like a song or a video,” she explains.
“In my mind, as someone who edits video, I think of this experience as a cross-dissolve or, in the tools of a DJ, a cross-fade. There is also a certain sense of cross-fading between the mediums and the art historical moments referenced.”
Both conceptually and physically complex, Leite’s steps into the unknown make for an exhibition of visual deception amid sculptural brilliance.
- TJ Boulting, Riding House Street, London. Open Tuesday-Saturday 11am-6pm. Admission free. Follow the gallery on Twitter @tjboulting.
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© Courtesy TJ Boulting
© Courtesy TJ Boulting
© Courtesy TJ Boulting
© Courtesy TJ Boulting
© Courtesy TJ Boulting
