Interconnected built spaces, a small stage within a large stage, peepholes, a sofa, space inside the sofa, cat flap, stuffed rabbit with a camera behind the eye, a toilet with a built-in rat trap consisting of wood, wire, peanut butter, and a smartphone attached to it, dentures, smartphones with videos, anime-March, television, Macbook, bed, furniture, refrigerator, meat with an embedded screen, pipes stuffed with meat, maggots, reflections in dishwater, Instagram account, external observer in front of a computer, sound, sculpture in a latex costume, and office chair.
The installation has traps of different natures. A homemade rat trap, in which a bridge hovers over a toilet and lets the victim drown in it using a tilting mechanism, reveals the narcissistic visual trap of the water in the cistern as being at least as dangerous for viewers. A smartphone is attached to the underside of the bridge and an Instagram picture can be seen in the reflection of the screen. It shows a hashtag scribbled in a red felt-tip pen. This hashtag leads the visitor's gaze to an Instagram account. The profile picture shows a rabbit. Someone posted the same picture over and over. You can see an ear with a candle in it and a hand forming a hole. The gaze is constantly guided through the exhibition space, jumping from reflection to reflection on the numerous screens and mirrors. The main room of the installation contains countless small holes, showing flickering smartphone screens. One sees cinematic rooms, brightly lit stages, and hands holding smartphones, on which you can again see hands with smartphones.
Cursed Image is partly Ashley in bed with demonic fluffy quadrupeds, Pokemon umbra, a decorative haunt of the Kigurumi1 cloak, conjures ‘Thesphiae’2 through the looking glass. There are two: the reflection and the bag of bones, they cross a gaze with us while we rest our heads and look through the couch crater. The image finally became one. I feel rubbed and embedded, while I sit in the metabolic lounge, by the sensual vicar movements, and the tubular bowels, perhaps remanent to early recognition of the self, by me and others.
A system of ambushes creates a specious narrative, the descendant mouth of constructions (the cistern), bait that is the echo of our large intestine, ironically unfolds a delicate system of Instagram players, exposed, hiding, and stunting, each other and us, with peanut smell, cautiously leading us to the furthest plateau of this crust, where there is no light anymore, it has absorbed it all, a theoretical mass space.
The profound calamity of perceiving and being perceived, these profane rooms of impressions have been made in all shapes and scales, leaks and outlets of appearances and simulacra, iterating consumption, sensual corners of the rectangular trinket, an obsidian speculum, shiny version of the arcane room that had at the end absorbed the light —as already mentioned.
Disorientation in the virtual and the physical, where the tunneling system made between us and them dissipates its solid particles, a quest to decode the blueprint of accessible chambers, that are either recurrent, or present in app presets, and streaming performers.
A wonderland clock animal is in the center console, willingly entering and exiting the cat‘s door, chronometer that leaves a crump path of the fragmented time consciousness in this organism—a figurine of icy phone charger through the drainage, and heart-shaped thews. A valve display, wet enough vital organs that shine and reflect, admonition that this elemental dramaturgy of echos is haunting us forever though cavities and holes, the devil is leaking. There are no traps and patches that could throw us away from this play.
Text by Paula Pedraza
