Inland - Photography by Maria/Rosario Montero

cueB gallery is proud to present Inland, an exhibition by chilean artist Maria /Rosario Montero.

Rosario particular research question explores the notions of landscape in relation to the territory and its inhabitants. Trying to understand from the representation of landscape; the interaction, negotiations and dialogues that occur between people, places and things. With this in mind, she uses art practice as a mean and anthropology as a method, locating, studying and producing visual material.

In this context, the involvement of photography in the representation of landscape through their material objects brings together material culture and views of the territory, as they represent the appearance of contemporary life, converting daily objects into a represented space of their own reality. Rosario photographs places and objects such as rooms, kitchens, classrooms, shoes, clothes, sheets, pillows, and books, among others, to understand the relations in place in the territories we live in.

She calls this process portraits in absence, and its central aim is to reveal (the construction of) identities within contemporary life that is responding to an urgent need to represent identity in a hypermediated scene wherein photography has attained a central role in representing in a visual-poetical way the contemporary state of the individuals.

In the case of the present exhibition, Inland, the aim was to reflect upon construction of the notion of landscape through photographs of imagined spaces. The intention was to explore the meaning and social relations that are brought by the ideas of a distant territory, those that belong to the past (Bellingston Farm, Lewisham) and those that belong to a distant idealised space. This second sets of photographs belongs to migrant restaurants in London, where the painting of a landscape create ambience whilst simultaneously depicting customers' pre-existing ideas about the distant place that is replicated and reminded.

The combinations of images plays a double role; they represent a specific geography but also, in the distance they perform as an object full of layered meaning, appearing as ‘both medium for and outcome of action and previous histories of action’ (Tilley 1994:23). In other words, the pictures of landscapes capture in part the active relationship that the subjects establish with a place beyond those walls.

For more information and images, please contact Franco La Russa at [email protected]