Janice Guy

Janice Guy, New York and Galeria Estrany-de la Mota, Barcelona
present

Patricia Esquivias
Rueda, repite, mujer

Patricia Esquivias develops her narratives meandering freely through historical fact, conjecture and anecdote. The mingling of these micro-histories highlights the impossibility of a linear and objective reading of history. Fluctuating in format between personal essay, formal lecture, and improvised performance, her works are backed by extensive research which at times can lead to dead ends, but can also head in unexpected directions whereby tenuous links and coincidence play a significant role in the story.

Esquivias' recent work focuses on architectural detail and ornamentation, the video installation Walking Still, 2014 being the artist's first work on the subject of sidewalks. During a residential sojourn in Quindío, Colombia came across the decorations in the cement sidewalks of the nearby town of Montenegro. They reminded her of the Pre-Columbian art of the area which appeared to have employed the same technique of cylinder embossing. On her return to Madrid, her computer crashed and she lost the photographs she had shot during her stay in Colombia. She subsequently searched Google Street View for similar decorations in small towns in the area. The result is a virtual tour with a sung narration in which she chants that "These kind of sidewalks are from the 1950s. When things in the country started getting ugly sidewalks got beautiful" and regarding certain patterns wants to ask a faceless man on the virtual street "are they monkeys or leopards?"

Along with the video, the series of Frottages de una acera en Montenegro, Quindío (Frottages of a sidewalk in Montenegro, Quindío), 2016 is an attempt to catalogue the uniqueness of the markings. As rubbings they are a direct transcription of the motifs found on these sidewalks, preserving the decoration in the face of gradual erosion and eventual disappearance.

The installation Rueda, repite, mujer (Roll, repeat, woman), 2016 continues the investigation of the relationship between the sidewalk embellishments and Pre-Columbian rollers; an investigation that led Esquivias to the architect Dicken Castro, his collection of archaeological objects and his relevant work as graphic designer. During her research Esquivias frequently seeks out artists, architects, and artisans not only as a stand against the concept of authorship but also as an acknowledgement of an enrichment resulting from a shared discourse. However, often those individuals cannot be found or they may not even exist. In this case, she was able to contact Lorenzo Castro, the designer's son, but did not meet Dicken personally. A suspended dialogue is embodied in a written letter to him, telling of her interest in sidewalks and rollers as well as her quest to find him. It proposes a shared workspace in which to build this choral narration.

On November 21st, 2016 Dicken Castro passed away in Bogota. With his death, the possibility of using that space and entering into a dialogue with him was no longer. Some months later Esquivias rolled a cylinder over a clay slab to find out if her intuitions were right. The resulting bas-relief is accompanied by the original letter she wrote to Dicken and the postscript written later. In this letter the artist orders, comments and translates the accumulated documentation. As in many of her projects, it presents an intermediate state, since this story does not have to end here and can be edited or encoded again at a later time.

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