Palisade

Mauricio Estrada

Reception: Friday, January 19th, 2018 7 – 9 pm
Exhibition Run: Thursday, January 4th, 2018 - Sunday, January 21st, 2018.

Palisade, is an installation that analyzes the value and truth of representational experiences and their multi dimensionality as means in which to ascertain their validity. It questions if and when the representational can replace the real. To unpack these ideas the common experience and established language of classical gardens is used to facilitate the discussion.

The Walls of Palisade are a hyper representation of natural forms, with their materiality, depth, and colour, abstracting them from reality. While gardens of the French and Roman Tradition sought to capture beauty and truth, this garden predicates itself on emulation. Its hyper flat depictions of nature and sculpture working to generate a ‘true’ experience that will ultimately flatline.

The conversations further continues with the use of virtual reality, a further separation from the ‘actual’ object/experience. Inside is an encompassing view of an enclosed garden, in which only a single viewer may inhabit at one time. Although the participants view may be obstructed the continued sounds, smells and other representational qualities of the installation become in dialogue with the image in the headset. As an interactive experience Palisade is passive, it does not perform, but quite the reverse, it asks of the participant to perform; though not for itself, but for onlookers within Palisade. The participant in the headset becomes an active sculpture within the garden, a vessel for the representational experience to meet the critical eye of actuality and truth.

Artist Bio
Mauricio Estrada is a Salvadorian-Canadian artist based in Southwestern Ontario. He recently received his BFA in Photography Studies from Ryerson University.

Mauricio is an image artist interested in unorthodox methods of representing everyday objects, spaces and experiences. His main area of interest lies in the space where the ‘natural’ and the ‘human’ intersect, resulting in objects and experiences that transcend previously established boundaries surrounding these two ‘distinct’ groups.