Fabiola Torres-Alzaga
Adaptando la Carta #1, #2, #3, #4, #5
2013
Fabiola Torres-Alzaga, Adaptando la Carta #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, 2013.
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Fabiola Torres-Alzaga plays with magic, illusion, and sleight-of-hand, fabricating installations, drawings, and films that toy with our perceptions. Her interests and the resulting aesthetic projects seem couched in the 19thcentury sideshow, more than the contemporary art world. In her delicate drawings, Adaptando la Carta, layers of tracing paper reveal different hand positions, concealing and revealing a playing card hidden among the curves of the magician’s hand. The artist’s fixation on the hand is persistent throughout the works, as she considers the limits between reality and illusion.
Fabiola Torres-Alzaga is an artist who works with drawing, photography, video, sculpture, and mixed-media installations. Primarily inspired by cinema and magic, Torres-Alzaga’s practice concerns notions of illusion, perception, manipulation and deception. Her work, which at first sight seems couched in the 19th-century sideshow rather than in the contemporary art world, aims to mediate alternative conceptions of space, time and reality through what she calls “visual traps”. Profoundly informed by art history, her works examine the defiance of logic and widely use illusory processes to etch counter-spaces that “claim inclusive folds within the rigid limits of patriarchy” and explore the possibilities for “other possible relations”. Questioning our perceptive faculties and the essence of things, Torres-Alzaga subtly confronts the viewers with the mechanics of illusion and relativity.