Inercia
The project Inercia [Inertia] by David Martínez Suárez was opened last 11 October and is on show until 3 February 2014. We are providing some further insights into the exhibition.
Inercia, David Martínez Suárez. Photo:LABoral/S. Redruello
By Laura Cano (@Via_di_uscita), La Caja Revuelta
For the sixth consecutive year, LABoral and the Instituto Asturiano de la Juventud [Asturian Youth Institute] have given the opportunity to a young Asturian artist to produce, exhibit and divulge an artistic project conceived specifically for the facilities at LABoral through the award LABjoven_experimenta. I would like to highlight the importance of this initiative which, along with a great many others carried out at the art centre, supports artists as they start their tough career in the artistic world. If such initiatives are always necessary, they are even more important during this time of crisis which is causing so much damage to the cultural world. Supporting the community in which you are immersed as a cultural institution can only create wealth and generate committed relations, confidence and respect, ensuring that society recognises you as an indispensable part of it.
David Martínez Suárez was the winner of the call for proposals this year. His project Inercia was opened last 11 October. A Fine Arts graduate with a Master’s and the recipient of various grants, David, although still young, is already creating his own language. He defines his work in the following way:
“I understand the work from the results of a technical operation, where elements that facilitate the appearance of the contents are incorporated, but not as a content or discourse that has been previously defined to be given a material solution. I am not interested in this type of result but in the language it produces, and the transparency in the variables that make its construction possible”.
For this project, David has used different materials and expressive mediums. From sculpture, installation to the video itself or film montage, making use of the facilities at the art centre to work with them.
The idea arose from three varied sources: a quote by Baudrillard in which he uses the word inertia to refer to social movements (so important at the moment), the film Streets of Fire by Walter Hill (1984), and the elements and characters of the video game saga Halo.
In the exhibition montage we could distinguish between three central concepts that are interrelated both aesthetically and thematically:
-Video: on one side of the exhibition room we can see three screens that display images from the film Streets Of Fire on a loop. Each screen shows us different images which, as they interact with each other, create a new narrative of the visitor’s choice: explosions, images of him and images of her. Directly in front of these screens, the video creation by David is projected onto the wall, showing us two children playing the video game alongside the images of the sculpture of John-117, the main character of Halo, engraved as a great hero surrounded by mountains.
-Installations: located in different sections, the installations recreate for us some of the scenes which take place in the video game Halo. The materials catch our attention in this case since wooden panels and 3D impressions have been used, giving the impression of incompleteness, while invariably providing an element that takes us and makes reference to this concrete moment - to this specific space that on the screen cannot move from these two dimensions.
-Sculptures: John-117 is represented in dozens of sculptures in small sizes that seem to speak to us of the different Johns we can find inside the same character. These numerous persons that we hide in ourselves can even take different directions out of inertia, while still being part of the whole. Of the subject.
As for myself, adopting the explanation that David gave about his work, I constructed my own meaning of the exhibition. In my opinion, in the room you feel there are evident different roles which the visitor/participant can adopt. When we play a video game like Halo, we become an active part of the action. Not only are we spectators but we also have the chance to decide, within the available options, what will happen. The representations of John clearly reflect this quantity of possibilities; of getting different Johns according to who is playing. In the videos, we are unable to interfere and we have to engage with the images from a distance. We become subjects who look and the only possibility of creation/action is that which we establish in our minds when connecting the images, not only with each other, but also with our own personal experiences. Finally, the installations make us move; they steer us on a walk around the exhibition hall, also as observers, but with the capacity to select, choose and draw our own conclusions.
Inercia invites us to play with the images, spaces and narrative, encouraging us to adopt the different ways of approaching a piece, an idea, that reaches us from different core concepts and which is based on a reflection of the situation in society today.
