NEW YORK – ART OF PRESENCE: SHAPING THE FUTURE THROUGH CREATIVITY
MONTSERRAT CONTEMPORARY ART
547 West 27th St.
New York, N.Y.10001
ART OF PRESENCE
Shaping the future through creativity
Lizzie Crawford | Bonnie Eisen| Gerda Falke | Gro Folkan
Kerstin Grobler|Sabine Hemming | Josefin Hill |Paul Zawadzki
Curated by Stefania Carrozzini
Opening Reception: Thursday December 8, 2023
6-8 PM
12.01.2023 – 12.14.2023
Gallery hours: Wednesday to Saturday 12 am to 6 pm
Montserrat Contemporary Art, in collaboration with MyMicroGallery, is delighted to announce, “Art of Presence: shaping the Future through Creativity” curated by Stefania Carrozzini. The group exhibition features work of eight artists particularly sensitive to the topic. If we had to identify some common denominators among the works presented here, it would be undoubtedly be their intention to integrate notion of time of materiality into a visual and semantic language.
What is the present ? And above all, how does art relate to the present ? Meanwhile, we can say that time is perhaps the greatest mystery. It can be measured only indirectly, and its succession in a sequence of movements on bodies, objects, landscapes, leaves the feeling of the unceasing flow of this invisible force. Significantly, many contemporary artists have tried in their work not to represent but to present time: as an everyday perception, observing it, condensing it, or stretching its flow. Performance art has been the discipline par excellence that has given value to the moment of the here and now. Consider, for example, Marina Abramovic with her iconic performance “The artist is present.”
Several insights and reflections are offered by this exhibition, starting with the title that links art to time as the present, but also as the present that generates the future, and how creativity, understood in all its aspects, models and shapes in becoming the evolutionary processes of human beings. The art of presence, in the context of shaping the future through creativity, is about being fully engaged in the present moment and using one’s creative abilities to influence what lies ahead. It is about using one’s imagination, innovation and vision, to create a better future through art, or any other avenue where creativity can have a strong impact. This concept emphasizes the importance of the awareness of perceiving oneself as the creator of one’s own destiny, in which our life is the highest form of creativity.
The art of presence in the analog digital time loop is understood as a creative activity that arises as our being in the world in the digital age is a continuous, we are often distracted by devices that place us in another time, we walk but do not observe because we always have our gaze fixed on the screen of the Smartphone, in a perpetual temporal displacement.
Inhabiting the here and now is thus an art, contemplates an exercise, a discipline. And in the time loop of our expanded present, it stands as a dominant trait, with what identifies our spirit of time. Everything revolves around the dialectical presence between the ephemeral and the lasting, and we, aware of the transience of our being, counter it with thinking and doing that shape lasting content. Underlying this is always the will to go beyond the ephemeral, to reconnect even for an instant with eternity and timelessness. It is amazing how in the world of artificial intelligence traditional means of expression, including painting, endure. And they resist the ever-increasing dematerialization of the real because they are part of a kind of experience that cannot be replaced with the virtual, as it brings us back to the body, to matter.
It is a process that develops in awareness of the anthropological shock we are witnessing, a shock not yet identified as a real danger. The black hole of online, or rather onlife, will increasingly devour the entire offline reality, life as such. In an increasingly hyperconnected reality we have no choice, then, but to save presence, our creative presence that distinguishes us as humans.