5. Gallery is excited to announce the opening of UNRAVELED an installation by Ilona Pachler
Opening Friday November 12th from 12 to 5 pm
Artist walk through Saturday November 13th from 3 to 5 pm
In her current work Ilona Pachler has been assembling a series of texts and ephemeral sculptures that express a feminine interpretation of parts of classic Greek Mythologies. Approaching them from the vantage point of figures that were written into monsters, whores and witches, a recanting of these male positions seemed necessary. As women, our own mythologies were never written by us. There were no texts talking about possibilities of hope, inclusions and beauty. Words by Gods and Kings - the only gospel handed down to us in male voices.
After reading “The Laugh of Medusa” an essay by the French philosopher Hélène Cixous in which the author exclaims that: “You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.” She began to write over exclusions and omissions and in her own voice. The title of these writings are called : Unraveling the labyrinth. The labyrinth that was built is being unraveled. It stood for a place of the hidden, the unwanted. Besides being a territory that all humans walk through in life.
Containing the Minotaur - not as a monster - but a figure that for his appearance was hidden away, together with Medusa and Medea,- two women that were wronged and punished beyond reason. These are written finally into a different context, circumstances of beauty and change and gained wisdoms through their experiences .
Currently she is collaborating with Minerva Projects in New York and owner, curator and writer Yasmeen Siddiqui - on having these texts published.
The accompanying visuals to the texts consist of abstracted, ephemeral sculptures using string, twine, thread and rope, to lay out and echoing the presence of these three figures, as they meet in the labyrinth. Working in her studio, these visual representations are taken down after being photographed and the photographic images will intertwine with the written word in the texts. As the sculptures in their non existence can never be viewed in the original form when first created, so are words that where unwritten in the past.
In her work at 5. Gallery she will exhibit an installation of new visuals of these figures that will again disappear after the installation is taken down. Even if recreated they can never be the same, as materials, knots, outlines - and the space that is their container - change. It is a progression of the studio work and a completely new temporal answer of images that inform her perspectives about these myths.