Water Stones and Creatures

Pedras e bichos d’água [Water Stones and Creatures], the first solo show by Marina Woisky (1996, São Paulo) opens at Millan on June 24, Saturday. The critical essay is written by the curator Germano Dushá.

Pedras e bichos d’água is composed solely of new works, created from the appropriation of images and the combination of processes of digital printing, sewing, and the filling of fabric with cement and acrylic blanket, resulting in representations of animals and landscapes that blend into intricate images of extraordinary and chimerical scenes.

The artist uses as a substrate for her production images of decorative objects and ornaments with representations of animals and nature, such as lacquer boxes, jade sculptures from Asia, and architectural ornaments from the Brazilian Baroque. Woisky then expands, cuts, and edits these images, which are then further intervened with stitching or painting before being "upholstered" with a cement mixture. Some of the pieces are also coated with resin, which gives them the shiny appearance of wet stones.

“Interested in the transmutation of the magic that surrounds these beings and places when they inspire everyday objects, Marina discusses the intricacies of contemporary image production, dissecting the aesthetic status of decoration, from more classical notions, through pastiche and kitsch, to mass culture and the digital advent”, as Dushá writes in the essay on the exhibition.

As suggested by its title, the exhibition then forms an unlikely landscape. Filled with images of waterfalls and animals, after going through several transpositions of media and materiality, becoming difficult to decipher, transformed into liminal beings, as if seen under the refraction of the surface of a stream.

Marina Woisky (1996, São Paulo) is graduated in Visual Arts from Unesp (2021). In addition to Contra-Flecha (2023), at gallery Almeida & Dale, in São Paulo, she has participated in Still Life/Still Living (2023), at Olhão, São Paulo, in Abre Alas 17 (2022), at A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro, among other group exhibitions.