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Amalia Pica

Pisapapeles






Guatemala City





    
    






Pisapapeles, is Amalia Pica’s first solo show at Proyectos Ultravioleta, gathering recent works that invite us to reflect upon the ways in which we’ve had to negotiate our personal spaces -home and office- as a result of the pandemic.

Given the sanitary restrictions, the personal and collective health protocols, and quarantine, our lives have been greatly reduced to our domestic spaces, and if we are lucky to nearby parks or even a second home. All of a sudden, our offices -those spaces that seemed tedious and monotonous, and which felt incredibly irritating- have invaded our homes and have forced us to reconsider the old ways we used to work… and live!





And it’s within this new order that Pica formulates one of the bodies of work exhibited in this exhibition, with her characteristic sense of humor and wit. The pisapapeles, a new sculptural series that lends its title to the show, are the result of all of the quotidian objects that appeared (and disappeared) on her dining room table during the pandemic, and after her recent motherhood. These objects not only reveal the material cultures that shape our lives -where our office resignifies our house, and our house resignifies our office- but they also become elements of endless play for her year old son, Marino. Like his mother, he also finds great joy and pleasure in the mundane, and entertains himself by making an endless array of free sculptural arrangements using fruits and vegetables, baby toys, and random household objects. Amongst his favourites: cucumbers, limes, wooden spoons, baby protectors, bars of soap, rolls of tape, the door-stopper, and how to forget the small wooden giraffe. It’s through these ephemeral readymades of Marino, that Pica extends the sculptural exercises of her son and casts them in bronze, and lays them on bases made up of -what else?- paper… towers of white printer paper that remind us of the tedium found in offices, and which in turns allow these sculptures to complete the function implicit in the title of this series: to weigh paper down. 





Even though they are formally playful, when looked at as a group, these sculptures offer us a critical reflection on the labour that is implied in maternity and in raising children -work which is oftentimes made invisible- especially when made in tandem with a professional career, and is laid bare on the same table. 
Additionally, Pica presents the conference tables and their respective studies to rearrange the conference tables: a second body of work which like the pisapapeles invites us to see the kinder and more pleasurable side to these places of tedium by excellence. This time, her focus is on office spaces themselves through conference tables that are unorthodox and adventurous, with bold geometric patterns realized in a vibrant palette. Made out of laminated plywood, in three basic and traditional forms (rectangle, semicircle and trapezoid) on metal bases, the tables have wheels. Throughout the duration of the show, and at the beginning of each week, the gallery’s staff will reconfigure the tables in a variety of geometric arrangements predetermined by the artist. By reconfiguring the table regularly, its seating will constantly change, allowing a possible alteration of the hierarchy of those that sit around it. Or, seen more abstractly, the tables can be understood as the restrictions and protocols that have been imposed in our lives as a result of the pandemic, and the possibility of rearranging them as a way to find the joy within this new reality.
And this is how despite facing one of the most challenging moments of the pandemic in Guatemala, Pica offers us an escape: an opportunity to observe, study and reformulate the elements -imposed and self imposed- that shape our day to day in hope of finding better and more enjoyable ways of living with them. In the end, we might not be able to change them altogether, but we might be able to resignify the way we relate to them.

            

            

                                    Other exhibitions by Amalia Pica at Proyectos Ultravioleta: