A meditative reflection on what constitutes an artwork animates Tris Vonna-Michell’s second solo exhibition at this gallery. In a destabilizing synthesis of art and life, the show offers a half-open panorama onto the artist’s biography and work, tossing out a bridge to the past, which is enlivened by his present research and his future output. This curious strategy, first presented in Italy in “The Trades of Others,” Vonna-Michell’s debut show at T293, is incorporated and “updated” here. During a performance for that earlier show, a young woman instantly translated an oral travelogue by Vonna-Michell into Italian, while a young man, seated at a table, transcribed everything. The text recited by the artist touched on a wide variety of trips: to Turin, to Japan, and also to the local Naples Aquarium.
In this show, that transcription sits on a table, on which various other objects are also arranged, thus creating an archive that includes photos and artifacts related to the work’s temporal evolution. The aquatic element that popped up in the work based on Vonna-Michell’s travels in Naples reappears in Wasteful Illuminations, 2008–, another installation that gives the show its title and conceptually unifies the works. A small aquarium and a slide projection of images interspersed with text are accompanied by a new sound recording made in Naples, which functions as the terminus post quem for the project. This activates a continuous play of references, with Vonna-Michell’s past pieces influencing the reading of the present—a dynamic that is nurtured by the infinitely refracting performance of self-quotations and by the reuse and hybridization of different media as elements that can be endlessly modulated and varied.
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
