TRACING SILENCE

23.10 / 11.11.2023 
MIAMI SURVEY
MIAMI

USA


Exhibiting for the first time at Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Uruguayan-Spanish mixed media artist, Elián Stolarsky, presents “Tracing Silence” an inaugural solo- exhibition that deals with concepts of memory, migration, loss, and history. Marked by stories of her grandparents’ inexorable migration to Uruguay as a result of religious persecution, Stolarsky’s work focuses on the destruction of war, the resulting diaspora and familial reverberations that ensue. This thematic thread resonates significantly throughout Stolarsky’s artistic production. Her work consists of highly individual narratives that are often constructed from seemingly inconsequential found materials such as family photographs, postcards, and hand-sewed fabric. She intentionally overlaps fiction by combining images and objects from the archives of her own history with that of found materials. Ultimately, Stolarsky reimagines her identity by providing a unique “tracing” into her family mythology.

Large-scale textiles are positioned as a labyrinth throughout the exhibition space, each driven by memories carefully traversed by time and sustained by earnest craftsmanship. In From the series Strange Country II n° 4 (2022), an abstract landscape of people is created from archival memories (photographs) not directly experienced by the artist, but which she reappropriates and imprints on the material. These memories become palpable in their transmission from one generation to the next, tracing itself into an inherited reality. In a never-before exhibited Textures From War 2023 drypoint and ink on plexiglass work, Textures From War (2023), Stolarsky engages the viewer with hyper-detailed imagery that needs to be seen closely as a way to grapple with and comprehend the intricate nuances of memory. When viewed from far away, the forms become figurative hazy recollections , transformed through an individual’s perspective. The impetus to explore this medium emerged from the ability to work in layers and develop an additive process, which the artist contends is how memory ultimately works– a present result of a culmination and superposition of layers nor a non-linear story that neither advances nor regresses, but mutates, and modifies.

Tracing Silence delves into the elaborate tapestry of identity and memory, navigating the hazy boundaries between fiction and reality when referring to the past. Focusing on biographical—sometimes autobiographical— elements in their most ghostly, latent, or effusive versions, Stolarsky’s work deliberately blurs the contours between fiction and reality as a way of challenging the complex dimensions of memory linked to her family origins.




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