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SHOW TITLE: Alba Magica
ARTIST: Martin Bonadeo
CURATOR: Murray Horne

For the first time ever, Wood Street Galleries will host Alba Magica, a retrospective of Argentinean installation artist Martin Bonadeo that spans over a decade of his work. Nine of Bonadeo’s installations will fill Wood Street Galleries entire exhibition space. Gallery visitors will have the opportunity to interact with Bonadeo’s projections, luminal sculptures and electronic objects that explore the ways in which we approach and measure space and time.

About Martin Bonadeo

Born in 1975 in Buenos Aires, Bonadeo holds a Ph. D in Social Communication and a Bachelor Degree in advertising. He conducted post-doctoral researching on relations between art, science and technology at UCLA. Bonadeo is a professor of Latin American and Argentine Contemporary Art at the Universidad Católica Argentina’s Latin American Studies Program. Since 2001, he has exhibited more than 30 site specific installations in Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Seville, Tokyo, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Denver.

The following seven installations will be on view at Wood Street Galleries:

real time vanitas

The spectators pass beneath a light bulb and a camera takes a middle ground shot of them. This image is projected in real time on a sand glass timer perfumed with naphthalene. As time is passing by the projected image vanishes and gets lost upon the sand glass.

re-visits

This project includes drawings, sketches, photos and floorplans of all the previous installations. The idea is to re-edit these original materials and work over reinterpretations, searching for new links and connection between them.

moebius display

Moebius display is a new output interface development. This interface is a simple LED (light emitting diode) screen that has a spatial and conceptual modification. Instead of being flat as the majority of screens, it is moebius stripe-shaped, a three-dimensional representation of the infinite.

NEWS (it is not)

This site specific installation starts in a little room where a back light with a shelf holds four closed glass jars half filled with Pacific Ocean’s water. Each jar has a 35 mm. slide picture of a different moment of a sunrise at Buenos Aires’s Plate River. The water acts as a magnifying lens. All the four horizons make a continuous line producing an illusion of many suns over the same river.

variable horizons

Hundreds of handcrafted thermometers are aligned to draw an irregular- green coloured alcohol horizon. The variations in this line are generated by instrument´s imprecision and also by the ambient and visitor’s temperature.

two suns

In this installation, two projectors facing each other from opposites sides point to two large screens. The images -sunsets and sunrises in flat ocean horizons- are aligned. The spectator is in the middle of both screens. The image is the same in both projections. While one sun is rising the other one is setting.

Fused americas

This work is based on a white flag artificially flaming in a mast, that functions as a screen for an interactive system. The superimposition of the different flags works by light colors addition, as an inverted prism -the sum of all colors is white-.

Alba Magica MMX

A white split-flap device, with white flaps written with white letters writes the name of the show. This images are showed in LCD monitors covered inside boxes in both floors of the galley and is also projected. The characteristic sound of this technology is amplified.