_Listening to Time (On the way of perceiving and other reasons_ in the work of Glenda León).
`If you knew Time as well as I do,' said the Hatter, `you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him.'
(From “Alice in Wonderland”) Lewis Carroll
In the year 2000, artist Glenda León (Havana, 1976) left small frozen flowers inside ice cubes upon the tables of a bar. This was a key gesture in the configuration of a poetic imaginary which has been interweaving ideas and motivations, feelings and denouncements, mediums and languages in the manner of discoveries, of small details that gradually make their way through her approach to the world. This making us reflect on the capacity to feel, to recover the beauty of things; on intensity ( the poetry of the instant moment) beyond the simple continuity of time, evoked a concern about life given the inevitable finitude of existence, an alert on the value we assign to the time we possess in the presence of an irremediable temporal future.
Glenda León’s oeuvre “interferes with daily life, puts what is real at a distance, and presents a relinquishment of temporality, an interruption of the course of things the way they usually occur.”[1] These slight shifts reshape the way of seeing the world around us and confirm her interest in “art as a kind of call to open our eyes as we walk through the world and which elevates us spiritually or mentally.”[2] Having studied Fine Arts, Classical Ballet, Dance, Art History and New Media, and being a follower of the work and the philosophical thinking of authors such as Gaston Bachelard, Milan Kundera, Félix González Torres or Gabriel Orozco, this artist has developed a multidisciplinary practice which includes drawing, photography, video, objects, and installation, through which she explores the gaps between visible and invisible, between sound and silence, similar and different, ephemeral and eternal.
The installation Wasted Time (2013), a small hourglass which is the symbol of the constant flow of time and whose content has overflowed, forming a tall mountain of sand, emphasizes Glenda León’s penchant for the fleetingness of time and life. Also present in other works such as Shapes of the Instant, 2001 (used soap bars and hair); Every Shape of Time, 2000 (hair that gives shape to different drawings), and Hourglass, 2006, this recurring theme calls attention once again to our steps and actions, to the possibility of rediscovering the world and of changing the course of our own history. The spilt sand is a reference to that “wasted time that we spend without love, without doing things consciously,”[3] to the accumulation of wasted moments which may even allude, given the time we are living, to the failure of the economic, political and ideological systems over the course of history.
Heir to the so-called New Cuban Art movement, León’s work includes a critical perspective and a special sensibility with regard to the everyday in the treatment of issues that define its contemporaneity. The great mountain of sand as metaphor for wasted time is accompanied by a series like Ways to save the world (2013), as when she presented those artifacts ( Magical Found Objects, 2005) which had been salvaged because of their magical, healing and renovating qualities. Hence, perhaps, the counterproductive, illogical, absurd attempt to sprinkle different drugs such as psilocybin (used for spiritual purposes in transcendence practices such as meditation and psychedelic psychotherapy) on the planet Earth; the utilization of mirrors which continually remind us of the fact that we must Accept ourselves and Accept each other, given our scarce capacity to connect with our own selves and to listen to others; or the elimination of frontiers on a global scale: a blackboard featuring a map of the world in which the spectators are invited to erase the borders which separate countries.
Hers is an oeuvre which, without being deliberately “political”, has a bearing on situations with a great socio-political significance, as when she decided to eliminate the ninety-mile distance between the coasts of Miami and Havana by representing these cities at the opposite ends of a swimming-pool. In this way, all visitors were able to swim and enjoy themselves while they moved easily from one country to the other, in a playful and longed-for Summer Dream (11th Havana Biennial 2012). A reflection on the planetary situation which may perhaps explain the different projections and representations of the universe that her imaginary offers: Chewed World, 2008, a map made using chewing gum of different colors, Between air and dreams, 2003, a map made from clouds, or the performance of actions such as Hope (Out of season), 2004, a public intervention, in which she glued artificial leaves onto the branches of a tree. In any case, they are works that potentiate the exploration of interior silence, of intimate space, of pure contemplation free from noise. Hence the importance of sound, of time and its different intersections with the visual, not only as a way to awaken our senses, enriching and transforming our image of the world, but as a way of subverting one’s own reality.
As is the case with the work of some artists of her generation aligned with neo-conceptual and neo-minimalist poetics, the pieces have their origin in “minimal gestures with a maximum incidence”, slight alterations that disrupt the use for which the objects are meant.[4] However, in Glenda León’s oeuvre, what prevails beyond conceptual forcefulness, narrative brevity, or the absence of superfluous elements is the notion of “an art that acts as a reminder of a state of harmony, a state of complete listening that humans have gradually lost, an act of transformation which can sometimes simply be a coincidence, revealing the imperceptible.”[5] How, then, not listen to the rain (raindrops on a music score, 2012), listen to chance (dice on a music score, 2012), or listen to the flight of birds (birds’ flight and music score, 2012)? Or propose a Silent rise (2013) over the wide landscape, or compose (draw) a series of eloquent and melodic silences with blank sheet music, Old Silences series, 2012: Broken silence (shattered sheet music), Interrupted silence (a blank in the middle of the sheet music); Crumpled silence (crumpled sheet music)…Plays with meaning, suggestive associations (reinforced by the titles) that describe a unique, singular character.
Those imperceptible beauties, like those “small flowers made perpetual inside an ice cube,” become the precursors of works which evoke the fleeting existence of man and things, which freeze sound and time through visual representation. Glenda León advocates a different logic, a different creativity and a different existence, inciting us to pause, to perceive and listen to the time it has fallen to our lot to live.
About Glenda León
Glenda León (Havana, 1976) obtained her MA in New Media Art at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany, in 2007. Her work spans a variety of mediums and includes drawing, video art, installation, objects and photography. She recently presented a solo show at the Château des Adhémar, Montélimar, France, and in 2012 she showed her work at Magnan Metz Gallery in New York.
In 2010 she was awarded a MAEC Research Scholarship in Madrid, and she was an artist-in-residence at the Fonderie Darling, Montreal. In 2004 she obtained the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. León’s works are represented in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the National Museum of Fine Art, Havana; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence; the Musée des Beaux Arts, Montreal, Canada: and Walter Philip Gallery, Alberta, Canada. She will represent Cuba in the 55th edition of the Venice Biennale.
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[1]Cfr. Blue Noise - Glenda León, January-March 2013, Les Chateaux de la Drome, Montélimar, France, at http://www.arte-sur.org.
[2] Glenda León: Madrid Creators’ Archive, http://archivodecreadores.es.
[3] Glenda León: (Quoted by Mila Trenas: “Latin American Art, one of ARCO’s high stakes,” at http://www.eldiario.es).
[4] Virgina Torrente: “Magic” (on the work of Wilfredo Prieto) en http://ca2m.org.
[5] Glenda León: Madrid Archive of Creators, http://archivodecreadores.es.