Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Pause: Practice & Exchange
Nathalie Talec
The One Who Sees Blindly
Apr 21-Jul 1 • Gallery 3
FREE w/ gallery admission

An iconoclastic artist, Nathalie Talec moves between live performance, installation, sculpture, and painting. For thirty years, she has developed her emotionally-charged “sentimental art,” proclaiming her ambition to re-enchant our daily lives. Through her work, Talec examines the human condition by reshuffling emotional affects—redistributing them into objects, words, and heroic characters—and creating scenarios that blur the boundary between reality and fiction, but which are held together by the figure of the artist, which is always at the core of her work.

For The One Who Sees Blindly, her first solo exhibition in the United States, Talec brings together elements representative of her ongoing artistic concerns. The installation Help Corridor highlights Talec’s fascination with the world of the polar explorer and the extreme cold. A running theme throughout much of her work, the polar explorer can be seen as a metaphor for the artist and the cold as a metaphor for art. Talec’s ideas about survival and heroism are borrowed from polar explorers and reduced to symbols such as ice tools, mist, snowflakes, and crystals.

In addition to Help Corridor, Talec will produce The One Who Sees Blindly, wall works based on an unpublished series of watercolors. Another work in the exhibition iswhat Talec calls a ”survivor space.” The space is filled with emergency blankets and adorned with porcelain and crystal sculptures, and will be activated through a series of performances in collaboration with San Francisco Art Institute graduate students.