Remain Detached leads an overflow of the mathematically calibrated digital imagery of Fifteen-Minutes of Sublime Meditation 2021 into a series of paintings, watercolours and textiles. In contrast to the dread-tinged video each of these hand-crafted images and textile patterns stop time, producing instead complex, static forms for spatial and material dwelling. The series of brightly coloured Psychoactive Renders, each of which was meticulously hand-painted using pigments on veneered wood panels, return soft, uneven textures to an intricately geometric iconic field that is often and increasingly reduced to the flat screen. As speculative mental landscapes of altered states, these images saturate perception, producing a destabilizing sense of movement and spatial orientation. This series of paintings is constellated with the Pi (π) series, which consists of framed circular patterns hand knitted and crocheted in cotton and silk by Annuska Angulo and Asalia Salazar from the Mexican artists collective Lana Desastre, who usually use yarn as a means to reclaim spaces of feminist possibility and presence in the public field. By contrast, the framed doilies allow a more intimate engagement with each pattern, both reclaiming their aesthetic, almost meditative singularity and reimagining a traditionally female craft through the lens of machine-enabled fractal designs. This palimpsestic conflation of the old and the new, the manual and the mechanical, comes full circle with a delicate set of drawings presented as Sublime Meditations, reminiscent of botanical illustrations and Surreal cartographies.
Extract from Mara Polgovsky text for the show Remain Detached, Sicardi Ayers Bacino gallery November 2022.