Gemma Pardo, ‘Congo 1880′.
One of the highlights from this year’s crop of young art grads included in the traveling New Contemporaries exhibition is a video simply showing the tide rising in an non-descript landscape, exuding a startling subtlety that’s getting more reactions than visually louder counterparts. Gemma Pardo’s ‘Congo 1880′ patiently shows the way the water takes over the land over a period of time. At the end the camera turns to nearby industrial constructions seen beyond the water. This place that initially looks like an essentialised nowhere, turns out could be everywhere.
The piece shows the endless lyrical potential of a simple, primal image and its inevitable coexistence with multiple narratives, the thudding awareness and the questions that follow history – the video has been made now but has anything really changed since the inhumane days of the title’s Congo in the 1880s? The waves still move over and recede back from the land; the implication can be read that nothing much has advanced; ironically, the only evidence of ‘progress’ are the industrial buildings seen in the background, probably half derelict and the site of social abuse, a powerful visual one-liner embedded in a work that’s memorable for its soothing peacefulness. Before the video’s over it becomes apparent that the landscape in view is an ordinary local creek, whose activities have been amplified to wondrous levels; might sound overly straightforward, but somehow the whole thing is really magical.
Pardo (b. 1976, Galicia, Spain, lives and works London), a 2007 grad from the Byam Shaw MA in Fine Art, is one of thirty-seven artists graduating from a UK Fine Art programme who have been selected from over 1200 open submissions by this year’s New Contemps panel – artist Michael Landy, curator Linda Norden and previous New Contemporary artist Nigel Cooke. From the selectors’ notes: ‘ ‘CONGO!’ became a New Contemps jury-rallying cry after we squinted through Gemma Pardo’s wilfully confounding seascape. Visual metaphor? Optical rebus? Pardo’s Congo 1880 has no punch line or crucial climax: it just persists and shifts almost imperceptibly. Given the history – and related histories – the continual oscillation between quasi-clarity and blur, absence and anticipation of resolution seems an exceedingly effective metaphor.’ Look out for more of Pardo’s deceptively tranquil work with artist group Nosotras (a group of seven emerging international women artists based in London, who recently showed at the Lee Vidan Gallery in Seoul, Korea) and screening at London multimedia events.
Lupe Nunez-Fernandez
Gemma Pardo’s ‘Congo 1880′
‘BLOOMBERG NEW CONTEMPORARIES 2007′
The New Art Gallery Walsall, to 2 September 2007
Club Row, London, 8 Oct-4 Nov 2007
Cornerhouse, Manchester, 23 Nov-20 Jan 2007
