Post Meta Nike-
Neo Gods & Hyper Myths
Focusing on the drifting of language and digital semiotics, Ira Lombardía explores the limit of the emancipation and codification of visual language, the strategies of appropriation of symbolic capital within the framework of the consumer society, and mediation of the artistic experience.
Neo Gods & Hyper Myths is a vast project, with eclectic pieces that mix images, digital post-production, collage, sculpture, video, and visual effects. Following on from Impudens Venus, shown at Untitled (Miami 2018), Ira’s second solo exhibition with Alarcón Criado presents seven new works that investigate further this thought process.
Venus Púdicas was a starting point from which to analyze the construction of female archetypes. On these new pieces, the iconography refers mainly to Nike, the goddess of Victory. In both cases, the viewer encounters archival images of classic sculptures (from the Aby Warburg Database) in contrast with images that came from the net, commercial advertisements, and other low-res images sources.
The pieces, small in size, confront their conceptual density, existence as products of hypervisibility and sign saturation. Statues, women without heads, winged figures, mirrors, tablets, pedestals, mobiles, limbs, and gestures, accumulate their meanings by playing with iconography while seeking linguistic connections. Thus, offering flexible and polysemic meanings to demonstrate the commodification of the symbolic.
Density is drawn as the central theme of the project, in which the mass of icons and its complex understanding grant the artist a promethean decoding task which, paradoxically can only be solved with subsequent coding work.
Signs are stacked, overlapped, and trimmed. The emphatic eternity that marble exudes collides with the immediacy of the digital image. The materials reinforce their differences and conflict becomes a discursive mechanism.
Antagonism and dysfunctions share relevance with connections and semantic games that become entangled in constructing meanings from opposite strategies. From this perspective, discourse is understood as a material and language becomes flexible, slipping over the hardness of the marble or blinking on images previewed by the tap of a scrolling finger.
Video
2018
Solo Show
Alarcon Criado Gallery
Seville, Spain, 2018
Solo Show
Scan Project Room
London, UK, 2019