Annie Sandano, The Unexplained, Fantastic & Unusual

Earlier this year, Annie Smits Sandano visited Brazil where she spent a month gathering information, photographing, drawing, writing, finding reference material and engaging with the environment and culture. The result is an extension of the dialogue established in her 2007 solo show Delirious Utopia.

With The Unexplained, Fantastic & Unusual, Sandano continues to investigate contemporary visual practices and belief systems and their links to the mixed cultural heritage of Brazil; the paradoxes and ambivalences and the belief in unexplained phenomena that underpin much of the country’s collective subconscious. Sandano makes reference to icons from the hybrid pagan religions which blend Christianity and Vodun culture and to the romance of the emotional, irrational folklore that the illiterate and uneducated masses exist in, capturing the vibrancy in how these are visually articulated.

Sandano’s practice is firmly rooted in wood cut printmaking, a technique which she consciously sourced from Brazil’s visual tradition with the intention of maintaining this connection with her own heritage and culture. Decorative elements are integrated with the very common, cheap and widely used “Chita” fabric, local artisanal fabrics and naïf painting. Many of the pieces for this exhibition have constructed, three-dimensional surfaces. Images are layered within a single composition and paper is used to compose assemblages within frames or expanded onto the gallery wall. This connects the spaces within the gallery to the spaces and surfaces from which references were sourced, among them: altars within clandestine churches and Baroque Brazilian churches.

En masse, the works characterise the historical foundations, contemporary practice, and prospective future of Brazil’s visual vocabulary: the unexplained, fantastic and unusual.

Event listed by Seed23

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