Beatriz Olabarrieta constructs sculptural installations that combine objects made of lo-fi building materials with short looped video sequences. Her exhibitions are sites for examining and generating performance and writing; each configuration is a stage for open-ended scenarios to unfold. Cosmic Clap simultaneously builds up and deconstructs Olabarrieta’s visual vocabulary. With a focus on the formal building blocks of text (lines and curves) the artist’s constants are the oval and the semicircle, the straight and diagonal line. These malleable elements are translated into representations of communication—the dot and dash of Morse code, hieroglyphic characters, astronomical charts, musical scores and mathematical graphs.
IMAGE CREDIT: Beatriz Olabarrieta, “Wall lamp nose quiet,” 2015, laminate, lamp, black cable flex, dimensions variable.