Gagliardi Art System is pleased to present Screenshots, a new, never-before-exhibited project by Margot Quan Knight. The artist, whose research has always focused on the photographic interpretation of reality, often with estranging and poetic results, now uses her unique vision and techniques to look into new visual perceptions suggested by tools, such as Skype, which are getting increasingly popular among users.

The visual fragmentation that is typical of this modality of communication goes hand in hand with emotional fragmentation, since the connected people are physically distant although they are linked by an affective relationship. The artist translates this fragmentation into a pixelated image painted on canvas, white on white, which can only be perceived through a particular light angle. This effect is also obtained in a surprising series of wax-on-paper works and, finally, in a work that is unique and unrepeatable for the complexity of its creation process, which involves the use of glass splinters as a way to short-circuit our vision, which becomes fragmented and, at the same time, recomposes the face of a person who is close to the artist.

From the exhibition text by Stefano Catalani: “Over the past ten years Margot Quan Knight’s artistic research has interpreted Bourgeois’s poetic of restoration of something whole through her embrace of an aesthetic of fragmentation in which the photographic portrait, always crucially at the center of her examinations, is critically scrutinized, taken apart, and reassembled in order to build a dialectic tension of identification between the subject—broken, incomplete, or barely there—and the viewer who engages in the reflection of what has been lost and/or what is being restored.

The research leads in multiple directions with diverse results but it always recognizes that the purpose of photography, with its pretension of “truth,” is to be scrutinized. Her most recent body of work, Screenshots, inspired by a personal journey of mending what’s been shattered and damaged, explores and explodes, and then reconstitutes the photographic portrait in unexpected ways, to achieve profound levels of lyricism.”

Gagliardi Art System
Via Cervino, 16
Turin 10155 Italy
Tel. +39 011 19700031
gallery@gasart.it
www.gasart.it

Opening hours
From tuesday to saturday
3:30pm to 7:30pm or by appointment