The Eye is the First Circle
Solo exhibition at Galleria Tiziana Di Caro, Naples
2024.01.26–2024.03.24
Lina Selander works primarily with video and video installation, and her research is based on the structure and nature of the image, evocation, history, and the dynamics that every representation holds and transfers.
The title of the exhibition quotes the American philosopher and writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in his essay "Circle", published in 1841, wrote: “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end”. This means that the first circle is the self, the second is represented by observation, and the third is the limit of what we can see.
The exhibition project opens with the installation Conductor, a video projected onto a cyanotype. The footage, originally shot in Super 8, is blurred by the overlap with the underlying image. In the video, you can see felines moving around an artificial pond. They always make the same movements, following the same pace. Every now and then they stop to drink, but the rhythm remains perpetual, illusory, hallucinated. Selander evokes an automated scenario; despite the subjects represented being emblems of the natural world, the sequences that we are presented with belong to an artificial world.
The series of cyanotypes is distributed throughout the gallery space. Cyanotype is a photographic technique invented by an astronomer in 1842. In it, two types of iron salts are mixed together, becoming very sensitive to sunlight. Objects that are placed between the salts and the light imprint their image, which remains indelible on the paper. The works proposed by Selander depict an herbarium in which leaves, flowers, blades of grass, and other natural forms can be recognized. In an antinomian process, they represent nature through a chemical process.
Another video installation occupies the space of the second room. It is a round projection that shows, once again, natural elements of various sizes taken in the Botanical Garden of Stockholm. This work is a tribute to Percival Lowell, who in 1894, using a telescope he built himself, was able to see the canals of Mars. He believed that they were not geological structures but artificial, thus justifying the existence of a Martian population that, to cope with climate change, had built the canals to transport water from the planet's ice caps to the fields to irrigate crops. In reality, it seems that the canals Lowell saw were the blood vessels of his own eyes, reflected in the image through the refraction of the telescope's glass. In fact, we are faced with a work that emphasizes the enigma of the image, its potential manipulation. The image shares this enigma with nature, which is also manipulable and enigmatic. The circle in which the video is configured is certainly a tribute to Lowell's telescopic vision, but it is also a reference to one of the geometric figures considered the most perfect and coherent.
In the next room, the theme of geometry returns in another video installation, Moon Tapestry, but this time there is a square that overlaps the image, almost as if it were a macula. It is still a work on the sedimentation of technology, on pastoral utopia.
Photo: Danilo Donzelli
