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KARLA HERENCIA
Transmedia Artist
Corporeal Resistance
The project consists of approximately 12 works that blend and blur the boundaries between techniques and materials; it constitutes a search for connections and conceptual links, a space for exploration and experimentation of the appearance and qualities of matter and its symbolic implications.
"Corporeal Resistance" aims to uncover an entity that is both body and object, it is a becoming between objects and their physical and socio-cultural aspects with the body and its psychological, biological, and social implications. The project establishes associations between the mechanisms involved in the relationship: body, processes of production, and waste treatment.
The strategy of the works is in some way to stimulate a visceral reaction that incites internal psychology to create new ways of observing the interactions between subjects and objects, between living bodies and inert matter. It is an encounter with oneself encountering the other, in what one expects or avoids, attracts or discomforts.
This project starts from the premise that the body is our link to the materiality of the world, it is a network of relationships and actions in which conscious and unconscious, collective and individual mechanisms are developed, so "Corporeal Resistance" points to the body as a space of socio-political tensions of something that is processed from it and within it. Thus, it seeks to reconsider the body from new connections that show us its resistances and dominions.
Another variable at play is the condition of waste of the materials used; a large part of the materials are remnants from the plastic industry. The "waste" initially results from the processes that make possible the useful objects that are accepted and adopted in the everyday life of our society; they are unwanted objects, monsters that reveal social orders between the accepted and the rejected.
But secondly, it could be said that waste (especially in our contemporary society) is sought to be given meaning in an attempt to restore order; waste is now classified, reused, studied, and given significance, problematizing the need for a society in which everything must be dominated and regulated. Garbage acquires a precept of projecting our values and our social relationships.
Both aspects highlight an ambiguous materiality; what was once strange and improper is now incorporated. This highlights the paradox between body and waste, bodies that discomfort, rebels due to their poverty, bodies at the limits of borders, sick, aged, which to some extent are labeled as grotesque. Bodies that, while being rejected, are reintegrated, regularized, so the issue is to review: the strategies and hidden intentions of normalization, the capacity for reinvention of the one who resists, and how being victims and victimizers of control systems affects us.
Karla Herencia is a Costa Rican artist who has currently focused on this exhibition on the aesthetic linkage of objects, their perception, and their original materials. It's a mixture that leads us to resist, to feel doubt, empathy, or rejection towards forms and entities that hint at an apparent reality and challenge our perception, thus opening the discussion around these stimuli provocateurs as well as ideas.
The provocation is subtle and persistent in each component of the exhibition, and as a whole, there is that transversal communication that binds dialogues between them and recaptures the viewer's gaze, like the curious analyst deciphering those organic and material sensations of waste and debris, which seem to be a riddle of a known reality.
Karla Herencia is one of the most recent and promising future artists of the sublime object (generator of aesthetic experience) and places the viewer before the challenge of sensations provoked through assemblies with an organicist cut or defined in collective conventions by their shape and appearance. It's an exercise on the re-construction of reality, whose strategy is to connect variables of the complex question about how much perception plays with our mind and how much it itself is forced to shape and name what it cannot immediately and automatically apprehend or abstract.
Linking the body with society's waste, tying meanings to make visible what is denied for being different and rare; that dialogue from the approach towards a truth defined from perception mediated by sensory factors. All of this unleashes emotional reactions and thoughts that the artist studies to see from an aesthetics of sensitive intuition, to a human being tied to the idea of a reality, resolved in the apparent and confusing environment of what surrounds them.
Juan Diego Roldán.
Sophia Wanamaker Gallery.
Costa Rican-North American Cultural Center.
Shapes and Thought in Karla Herencia's Work
Currently, young artists are moving away from modern ways of making art and delving into forms and image production processes that respond to new needs for expression and social projection.
Emerging artistic forms connected with postmodernity practices lead novice artists to seek those materials and processes that are important - regardless of their nature - as vehicles for conveying the concepts and discourses they wish to address to the public.
From this perspective, any material is susceptible to being transformed into material for communication through art. Similarly, the construction and elaboration procedures of the proposals will take various forms in which adherence to the concept that moves the creator in multiple directions to achieve their goal prevails.
Karla Herencia's work, the result of a serious and systematic study process, travels through these paths, interested in communicating ideas related to issues linked to the culture and society of our time. Some elements present in deconstructive processes based on critical theory are glimpsed as axes that modulate Herencia's artistic work.
In Corporeal Resistance, the title that the author has given to her exhibition, a space or place of visuality invaded by ambivalence and the idea of transformation is outlined. From a starting point that recalls the organic and the body without fully being it, Karla constructs objects that we understand from the notion of plasticity governed by color, texture, shape, and spatial management. Despite this condition, the resulting pieces do not resemble the visual forms typical of modern art. If we had to point out links with any reference at the level of art history, it will possibly be the name of Eva Hesse that quickly comes to mind. The "formless" and "organic" condition, perhaps visceral for some, is the one that best connects with Herencia's work.
The author is interested in the construction of hybrids that inhabit territories beyond the categories of object or painting and that are imbued with a formal identity that associates them with the corporeal. This idea of body transcends the notion of the physical-organic because Herencia endows it with meanings also related to sociocultural aspects present in our imagination as an evocation linked to corporeal organicity.
The sensation of uncertainty permeates the pieces as an intention directed at awakening the tension and juxtaposition of materialities and senses that extend to incorporate the worlds of the individual and the social. The artisanal and the artistic, the artificial and the natural, certainty and ambiguity transmute into a constant play in the viewer's mind.
On the other hand, the author establishes a relationship of contrast between mechanical processes, typical of industrial production, from whose action waste results, and the processes of the realms of the artistic and the artisanal, which are fundamentally the result of manual work. At this level of the proposal, human actions of creation and destruction are polarized as activities that reveal facets of social, economic, and sense attribution uses.
The research carried out by Herencia to materialize this exhibition is informed by notions that arise from contact with sociological studies associated with waste. This dimension covering aspects of the economy, society, and contemporary culture poses the idea of the attitude towards waste, undesirable but which is; however, part of the process of creating prestigious and desirable objects. Thus, the contradictions and social tensions between what is accepted and what is discarded or rejected as undesirable are revealed.
The materials that Karla employs, by changing "cultural place" and being proposed within the sphere of art, are regulated, recovered, and enter a status regime that operates as a metamorphosis re-signifying their waste material condition. By carrying out this transformative operation of meaning and condition, Karla "invents" a re-generation or "normalization" that occurs in the transition from one condition to another. By entering the order of visuality, this recent "invention" generates a paradox that allows reflection on the assignments of meaning and the uses of materials and objects within the dynamics of culture.
The author asserts, however, that her intention is not to "normalize" but rather to "show that what is considered normal can be as abnormal as vice versa." Herencia reaffirms, "perceptions of one thing or another overflow," in the realm of experiential experience - the artist thinks - perception of reality and reality itself constantly shift, objects and bodies test the conventions built about them.
Herencia states regarding her works: "For me, the work of art is a tool for reflecting on the process of signification, so I try to create models of connectivity, that is, forms that materialize and enable links between the physical (material) qualities of the object, with the subjective (psycho-emotional) projections stimulated through the sensory perceptions of a subject" - This is what Herencia understands by the "corporalization" of what happens from and within it. The author declares that in this process spatial dimensions also intervene, "understood as everything that the environment or system throws in which bodies and objects are inserted."
To achieve this purpose, Karla highlights in her works in particular "rebellious objects that test the systems to which they belong (waste and artistic object)" in turn, she emphasizes "bodies that defy social canons and conventions" creating the areas of rupture with a disruptive action that becomes the axis of her proposal.
The author is interested in thinking about her plastic work from the realm of experimentation, exploration, and constant change. The formal configuration of her pieces breathes this condition and grants the works a dimension that understands the artistic as a "living body" in constant resistance against the categories that may classify it as one thing or another. The heart of this proposal insists on the undetermined, a territory in which things seem and suggest but are not what they make us think. The familiar and the unusual, the fragile and the stable, the natural and the artificial, the animal and the human, order and randomness, the visceral and the visual-plastic conjugate as a chrysalis ready to transform at any moment to surprise us again with different and unexpected metamorphoses.
Efraín Hernández Villalobos
Curator, academic, and researcher
School of Art and Visual Communication
CIDEA, National University.
Karla Herencia is a graduate and lecturer at the School of Art and Visual Communication of the National University. I have had the privilege of observing the work process of this creator who begins in design, moves on to painting, and with responsible perseverance presents this individual exhibition.
She starts her journey as a visual creator with her exhibition "Corporeal Resistance". She approaches her gaze towards being, towards the feminine, and towards an interiority turned into an aesthetic object, specifically sculptural creation. Presenting questions for the viewer's interpretation to openly problematize different realities, from the plasticity and openness to meaning.
Threads, lines, convergences, points, fibers, painting, sculpture, object, interiority, and conceptual principles for the visual communication of an anchorage and a semiotic turn to the literalness of the body and the intimate, shifting the focus from trauma to the study of the visual nature that represents resistance, enveloping and weaving a warp materialized in objects that stem from an action and a gesture. The young creator contributes a transformation of the body, from the porous, social body, which does not succumb to the structure and reveals itself to imposition, a limit that faces a duality between the aesthetic, action, and the pragmatic.
The effects of these objects are not only psychological but also bear the mark of the history of the body; on one hand, a tissue with holes and on the other lines that open the reading to the complexity of resisting, not only to lack but also to the act of surviving in a global world that annuls, oppresses, and empties.
For the Costa Rican-North American Cultural Center, it is an opportunity to open up to contemporary young proposals, to curate to give the Costa Rican public the possibility of appreciating from critical awareness a vision of the context in which we live.
José Pablo Solís Barquero
Director. School of Art and Visual Communication
CIDEA, National University.
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