proxy gallery

PROXY Gallery is delighted to present the exhibition The Inside of the Outside by Marcela Gottardo and Sofia Londono. For this project, the artists took a plaster cast of the outside of the Proxy Gallery, so that the interior of the resulting cube really represents the exterior of the original gallery. They then cut a square hole in a wall elsewhere in the building and positioned the cast in it in such a way that what appears as the cavity, the inside of a wall alcove, can be seen from the corridor, outside the project space. The outside, the back protrusion of the cast cube is only visible from inside the project room.

Gottardo and Londono have separate sculptural practices that are nevertheless traversed by certain commonalities in materials and methods. Marcela Gottardo often uses plaster to take impressions of flat surfaces and architectural spaces, while Sofia Londono has been known to produce plaster objects that are the positives of body cavities. Both artists use the plaster impression as the final product, not an intermediary stage for casting something else, thus foregrounding its indexical nature and its affinity to the negative in film photography.

By taking the material framework of the gallery as its very subject, The Inside of the Outside activates in the mind a mise en abyme, an endless self-referential loop, similar to Shakespeare’s or García Márquez’s play-within–a-play-within–a-play, or dream within a dream. As in recursive language or fractal geometry, we are confronted with space framing space framing space, empty space containing empty space (therefore not empty), a gallery exhibiting a gallery; the outside of the inside is also the inside of the outside, and so on until the nested meanings and value hierarchies lose their oppositional force and become mirrors of each others’ instability.