The body, its fluids, fragilities, rhythms and vibrations constitute the raw material and the terrain for Lia Chaia’s investigations. Marked by natural landscapes as well as urban situations, the body is simultaneously subject and predicate in the constant clashing between nature and culture.
In the solo show Anônimo, however, the relation between the natural architecture of the body and the fabricated architecture of the city no longer lies in the constant friction between these two materialities, a characteristic that pervaded Chaia’s previous works. In this solo show, the body arises already inserted in, incorporated and adapted to the urban space, thus confirming its permeability and ability to adjust to new situations.
The rigidity of the bones, the flexibility of the muscles and skin, the stable structure of the skeleton versus the dynamics of movement, along with the hiding of the organs and bones were some of the questions dealt with in Chaia’s researches, which are materialized in the format of videos, photographs, drawings and collages, as well as in the installation Fachadeira (2010) that occupies the Galeria Vermelho’s façade. In this work, created on nylon screen like that used to cover buildings under construction or being remodeled throughout the city, Chaia prints the configuration of the vertebra of a spinal cord on the façade’s 15-by-9-meter surface.
Músculo Pena [Feather Muscle] (2010) uses two images – one from the front, the other from the back – to present the figure of a human body taken from an anatomy book. Chaia completes the image by gluing red feathers over the drawing, resulting in an aspect similar to common images of body tissues and muscles. In Esqueleto Vegetal [Vegetal Skeleton], the artist dissects the body, removing its flexible parts. In the series of collages, what we see are bones of a skeleton presented individually as the result of an archaeological research that seeks to understand the structure of the body.
Views of the entire human skeleton appear in the series of drawings Fusão [Fusion] (2010), made on voile screens, which create transparencies while serving as partitions, creating different forms of displacement in space. In the video Skeleton Dance (2010), Chaia appears behind these screens adding flesh to the forms of the anatomy manual that appear in Fusão.
In Anônimo, the body is presented as an immediate presence and profound refuge, either fragmented or as a whole composed of millions of parts.
The body, its fluids, fragilities, rhythms and vibrations constitute the raw material and the terrain for Lia Chaia’s investigations. Marked by natural landscapes as well as urban situations, the body is simultaneously subject and predicate in the constant clashing between nature and culture.
In the solo show Anônimo, however, the relation between the natural architecture of the body and the fabricated architecture of the city no longer lies in the constant friction between these two materialities, a characteristic that pervaded Chaia’s previous works. In this solo show, the body arises already inserted in, incorporated and adapted to the urban space, thus confirming its permeability and ability to adjust to new situations.
The rigidity of the bones, the flexibility of the muscles and skin, the stable structure of the skeleton versus the dynamics of movement, along with the hiding of the organs and bones were some of the questions dealt with in Chaia’s researches, which are materialized in the format of videos, photographs, drawings and collages, as well as in the installation Fachadeira (2010) that occupies the Galeria Vermelho’s façade. In this work, created on nylon screen like that used to cover buildings under construction or being remodeled throughout the city, Chaia prints the configuration of the vertebra of a spinal cord on the façade’s 15-by-9-meter surface.
Músculo Pena [Feather Muscle] (2010) uses two images – one from the front, the other from the back – to present the figure of a human body taken from an anatomy book. Chaia completes the image by gluing red feathers over the drawing, resulting in an aspect similar to common images of body tissues and muscles. In Esqueleto Vegetal [Vegetal Skeleton], the artist dissects the body, removing its flexible parts. In the series of collages, what we see are bones of a skeleton presented individually as the result of an archaeological research that seeks to understand the structure of the body.
Views of the entire human skeleton appear in the series of drawings Fusão [Fusion] (2010), made on voile screens, which create transparencies while serving as partitions, creating different forms of displacement in space. In the video Skeleton Dance (2010), Chaia appears behind these screens adding flesh to the forms of the anatomy manual that appear in Fusão.
In Anônimo, the body is presented as an immediate presence and profound refuge, either fragmented or as a whole composed of millions of parts.
