Raphaela Melsohn

Poltrona tentáculo de ovo, 2020
Metal, metal cable, tv monitor, video, foam and fabric
Approximately 1,25 x 1,87 x 0,74m

Poltrona tentáculo de ovo is an immersive structure in metal, foam, and fabric, where a body is invited to recline, molding itself in the foam and allowing itself to be absorbed in a choreography of gestures that occupies its field of vision. The work is also a homage to two Brazilian artists: Maria Martins and Lygia Pape. Their works reference the words “tentacle” and “egg” as the tentacle expansion to space and the egg notion of containing and developing oneself.

Poltrona tentáculo de ovo is informed by the etching below, titled Querida Lygia, obrigada pelo teu ovo. It pays homage to Lygia Pape, the artist I never met, but my work somehow did.

Translation:

There is a point where things overflow. When isn’t either line nor hole is egg or piraquê. Crackers multiply infinitely - reproduce by the mouth - ouch! There are also objects of desire that touch multiples, modules // drawing. And tetéia goes/flows to the world. Print that spreads its image indefinitely. If carved metal leaves leftovers into the world, the rest/negative/line on space becomes tetéia without margin or maybe within walls of a dark space, maybe. I wish I could make you an homage, just like a love letter to someone that I have never met. Or this can be just an excuse, I don’t know. What comes from inside out and isn’t uterus. Is desire, will, querer, tesão, passion, love, disgust, obsession, you don’t explain. It’s hard to remember the direction of “D” s, “B” s, “P” s and “Q” s when you write backwards.

LIQUID LEAKING, UNABLE TO CONTROL. The latest page on notebook says: staying alive requires collaboration, contamination, precarity, words scattered on the studio’s messed floor, unsettled, unshaped, fluxes, the complexity of materials, bulges, holes, (how to) inhabit, architecture and bodies, soft, and wet.

With a BFA in Visual Arts from FAAP (’16) and currently enrolled in Columbia’s Visual Arts MFA program (’21-’22). Among recent exhibitions include “Não vamos para marte 2” (Galeria Jaqueline Martins, online 2021), Eco Shifters (Fondazione La Fabbrica del Cioccolato, Blenio, 2019), RECIPES FOR B_R_Z_L?, (Spring Break Art Show, New York, 2019), and solo show “investigations in VIDEO: register, displacement of view and WAYS OF THINKING” (MIS, São Paulo, 2016). Recently resident at Kaaysa (Boiçucanga, 2020), Pivô (São Paulo, 2019), AnnexB (Brooklyn, 2018), and Red Gate Residency (Beijing, 2016).