KARINA PEISAJOVICH | Painting, Light, & Shadow
Then I got a grant, a Fulbright to come to New York. I did it in the International Student Curatorial Program. It was a very intense year for me because . . . well, I arrived August of 2001, two weeks before September 11, and so I witnessed the whole situation in New York, and at the same time there was a big crisis in Argentina in 2001. It was like a political and economical crisis—everything collapsed. It was a very intense time for me, being there; it was kind of like, schizophrenic, and I worked a lot.
In January, I was invited by Gregory Volk and Sabrina Russ to do a show that was called The Force. It was my first show in New York, and I did a piece called Domestic Landscape. This was the first time I started to paint more on the walls. I started to use also shadows.
I forgot to tell you that before this piece I did another show in Buenos Aires—I don't have images here—and I started to use shadows at that time and projecting lights onto cut-out papers that projected the shadows onto the walls. I think I started to work with the shadows because I started to think that light was too much associated with the celestial light, like purity. And I needed—I have kind of like an ambition “to dirt” the light, which was very difficult because light is an additive mix.
In painting, you mix colors and you get to black, but in light, if you mix colors, you get to white; there is no gray in light. Working with shadows was a way to get a gray working with light. And the shadow is the opposite side of light. And I also was thinking that shadows were less important than light, like light is monopolizing the beauty.
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