Catalina Tuca
The Sensitive Project
May 12 - June 10, 2023
Reception: Friday, May 12 @ 6-9pm
Arte Fuse
📷 Installation Photographs by Yi Hsuan Lai
Lydian Stater is pleased to present an exhibition of new digital and sculptural works by Catalina Tuca, her first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Catalina Tuca is a lover of objects. She relishes in their presence; the space they occupy, the way light plays off their surfaces, the weight of them in her hands. Consequently, it is no surprise that she has spent much of her time since the pandemic undertaking the monumental task of translating something with no inherent physical presence into a thing with multiple presences; audial, visual, sculptural.
In The Sensitive Project (2020-Present), Tuca solicits detailed accounts of personal emotions from willing participants. These oral accounts are passed along to designers to create digital renderings of each emotion. Audio recordings are then paired with video of semi-static digital objects, rotating slowly or dancing within the frame.
In one work, Orsolya Gal (Romania) describes her emotion in visual terms, saying “It’s quite big. Changing between fifteen and twenty centimeters. This thing … it’s round and that is for sure. Even if it’s not a perfect sphere, towards a sphere … the surface is close like glass and it’s hard, but inside, the density, it’s less dense … The color of it, it’s blue towards gray, but it is changing on the surface.” Modeled as a 3D object by Ian Hill (USA), the resulting images are a distinct interpretation of the description given by the speaker.
But it is just one interpretation. As with many of Tuca’s previous projects, the artist transfers some of the decision-making process, playing with both the authorship of the works and relational aesthetic concerns in a global and decentralized art making process. And while the digital objects allow us to experience these personal emotions in a new way, Tuca wants and needs them to exist in the real world, off screen and in one’s hands. In one more reverse-sublimation, Tuca and her collaborators translate the digital renderings into sculptural works using 3D printing and analog methods.
Emerging from a time of uncertainty, these sculptures act as relics of a time both long ago yet omnipresent, allowing each emotion’s owner to have a physical record of their feelings of fear, vulnerability, and confusion. The Sensitive Project allowed Tuca to connect emotionally with others during a tumultuous pandemic and continue to beyond it. In this immersive audiovisual installation, Tuca extends this connection to her viewers, allowing them to be with one another, both in the physical space of the gallery and the liminal field produced by her works.
Catalina Tuca (b. Santiago, Chile) is a multidisciplinary visual artist, educator, and independent curator, working at the intersections of geographic identities, collective memories, and hybrid systems of collaboration and participation through existing technologies. After earning her BFA and a degree in Visual Arts Education, she developed her career in Santiago, showing work in solo and group exhibitions, teaching Visual Arts and Film, and creating and directing art spaces such as Oficina Barroca Gallery and CANCHA Santiago Residency Program. During this time, she participated in residencies at Youkobo Art Space (Tokyo, Japan), Taller 7 (Medellin, Colombia), and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (ME, United States). Following the completion of her MFA at Rutgers University in 2018, she was a member at NEW INC, The New Museum Incubator Program (NYC), a fellow at The Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program (NYC), and a resident at NARS Foundation (NYC), Collider Art Residency, Contemporary Calgary (Canada), and Foundation for Contemporary Arts (NYC). She has participated in solo and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad, most recently Rerouting at Contemporary Calgary (Canada) and Temporary solutions that stay forever at The Clemente (NYC). She is currently an Adjunct Professor at Rutgers University and Pratt Institute. She lives and works in Brooklyn.