SPUME
Spume, was inspired by Sofronia, a city in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities that was made of two “half cities”—one is permanent while the other is taken apart, packaged, toured, and re-mounted to make other cities “whole” again. Spume also consists of two cities: mounted onto eight large-scale windows in a skyscraper overlook in Abu Dhabi, the work is an overlay of cityscapes with Providence in the foreground at a miniature scale and the city of Abu Dhabi in the background. First installed as part of Providence True Love Always (PVD-TLA), group exhibition organized by Maya Allison in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, October 25th 2013. Group exhibition PVD-TLA Abu Dhabi city, UAE. Curator Maya Allison
Laser cut black vinyl on five window panel High-rise 66x20 feet |
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Magaly Ponce's Multimedia Installation travelling from Providence to Cape Verde, Lisbon and The Azores. Photo documentation of by Frank Mullin
Exhibition inSight-s: A Multimedia Installation in Three Continents Providence Arts District, 65 Eddy, Providence, RI. USA Solo exhibition inSight-s: Uma Instalação Multimédia em Três Continentes, Museu Carlos Machado Ponta Delgada, São Miguel Island, The Azores, Portugal. Curator: João Paulo Constância Solo exhibition inSight-s: Uma Instalação Multimédia em Três Continentes, Museu Nacional de História Natural Lisbon, Portugal. Curator: Drª Sofia Marçal Wallace L. Anderson Gallery, BSU, Bridgewater, MA. USA. Educational display of larger exhibit. Solo exhibition Ponte d'agua. Mindelo, Cape Verde Palácio Da Cultura Ildo Lobo, Itinerancy Director Drª Samira Pereira Solo exhibition Palácio Da Cultura Ildo Lobo, Praia, Cape Verde. Director Drª Samira Pereira |
INSIGHT-S
A Multimedia Installation in Three Continents. 2011
This art exhibition is a culmination of two years observing whales off the coast of Plymouth, Massachusetts while assisting the Humpback Whale Ethogram Project, conducted by Carol Carson at Bridgewater State University’s Biological Sciences Department and New England Coastal Wildlife Alliance– NECWA, a non-profit organization that dedicates their efforts to the protection and conservation of marine wildlife. The collaboration has compelled me to better understand these enormous and complex creatures and inspired me to incorporate them in my artwork. Using sculpture, digital photo-collage and video, I celebrate their beauty and humor, reflect on their likely extinction, and consider the industries that have developed around them. Whaling once sustained the economy and enriched the cultural life of Portugal and the New England colonies. In this spirit, I have been coordinating the traveling of the works to whaling locations, starting in Providence, RI, US to Praia and Mindelo, Cape Verde, Lisbon and the Azores, Portugal. |
SPONSORS: Consul Sr. Erwan Varas Museu Nacional de História Natural Lisboa, Portugal / Lisbon, Portugal Sr. Prof. JoseÅL AntoÅLnio Sampaio da NoÅLva, Reitor da Universidade de Lisboa Lisbon University Provost Dr. Sofia Marcal Diretora de Programacao Sala do Veado Director of Programming Sala do Veado Dr. Jorge Prude^ncio Diretor Departamento de Zoologia Director Department of Zoology Museu Carlos Machado Ponta Delgada, Sao Miguel, Acores, Portugal Ponta Delgada, San Miguel, The Azores, Portugal Diretor do Museu / Museum Director Dr. Duarte Melo Curador / Curator Dr. Joao Consta^ncia APOIOS / SUPPORT Arnold B. Chace, Jr., Steve Durkee Cornish Associates Carol Carson New England Coastal Wildlife Alliance, NECWA Robert Rocha The Whaling Museum, New Bedford, MA Angelo Barbosa Cape Verde University, Uni-CV Pedro G. Carvalho Cape Verdean Consulate, Boston Amilcar Morais Ponte d’agua, Mindelo, Cabo Verde Irineu Rocha M_EIA Mindelo-Escola Internacional de Arte LuÅLcia Marques PALESTRAS / CONVERSATIONS Museu Nacional de História Natural Lisboa, Portugal / Lisbon, Portugal 5.18.2011 Nantucket Historical Association Nantucket, MA, USA 8.12.2011 CART Colloquia, Wallace L. Anderson Gallery Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, MA 10.12.2011 The Providence Athenaeum “Hark! The White Whale!” Salon Series Providence, RI, USA 10.14.2011
CART Colloquia, InSight-s: A Multimedia Installation in Three Continents Wallace L. Anderson Gallery, Bridgewater State University 40 School Street,Bridgewater, MA 02325 The colloquia promises to be a lively conversation between Professor Ponce; Natercia Caneira, Portuguese sculptor, co-founder of Aumento d'Ideias; Carol “Krill” Carson, marine biologist and President ofNECWA; Vannessa Rodriguez, BSU student intern; and Martina Windels, German designer and Arts writer, about the process of creating, installing and transporting a whale inspired art exhibition to three continents."InSight-s" at Bridgewater is a Traveling Exhibit Documentational Display of the journey the art and artist undertook during a one year sabbatical leave from Providence, Rhode Island, to Cape Verde, then Lisbon,Portugal, and finally, The Azores. Guests are participating both at Bridgewater and The Providence Atheneum thanks to the generoussupport of these sponsors: CART Center for the Advancement of Research and Teaching, The Departmentof Foreign Languages, Women's and Gender Studies Program, Bridgewater State University; Dr. JosephA. Chazan; RISD Sculpture Department; Jillian Siqueland of Residential Properties; Roger WilliamsUniversity, Visual Arts Department.Exhibition catalogues about the project are available with essay by Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, Director of The Sheldon Art Galleries, St. Louis Missouri
CART Colloquia, InSight-s: A Multimedia Installation in Three Continents Wallace L. Anderson Gallery, Bridgewater State University 40 School Street,Bridgewater, MA 02325 The colloquia promises to be a lively conversation between Professor Ponce; Natercia Caneira, Portuguese sculptor, co-founder of Aumento d'Ideias; Carol “Krill” Carson, marine biologist and President ofNECWA; Vannessa Rodriguez, BSU student intern; and Martina Windels, German designer and Arts writer, about the process of creating, installing and transporting a whale inspired art exhibition to three continents."InSight-s" at Bridgewater is a Traveling Exhibit Documentational Display of the journey the art and artist undertook during a one year sabbatical leave from Providence, Rhode Island, to Cape Verde, then Lisbon,Portugal, and finally, The Azores. Guests are participating both at Bridgewater and The Providence Atheneum thanks to the generoussupport of these sponsors: CART Center for the Advancement of Research and Teaching, The Departmentof Foreign Languages, Women's and Gender Studies Program, Bridgewater State University; Dr. JosephA. Chazan; RISD Sculpture Department; Jillian Siqueland of Residential Properties; Roger WilliamsUniversity, Visual Arts Department.Exhibition catalogues about the project are available with essay by Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, Director of The Sheldon Art Galleries, St. Louis Missouri
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VIDEO ANIMATIONUSA 2006
Projection at Roger Williams University, Bristol, RI. Curators Megan and Murray McMillan of video created for PIXILERATIONS [v3], a showcase of digital media and interactive performance September 29 - October 14, 2006. Providence, Rhode Island. 
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SOMADA PRAIA DIRETUVideo projection by Magaly Ponce, from Palácio da Cultura, Exhibition Somada Praia Diretu- as part of Artist in Residency Program organized by António Rocha and Gisela Creus, July 2009
Palácio Da Cultura Ildo Lobo, Praia, Cape Verde. Director Drª Samira Pereira, 6/2009 Photography Helder Paz Montero |
SUBJECT, HORIZON, REFLECTIONMultimedia Installation
September 2006 Curator:Vesela Sretenovic Incorporates six different projections of hazy landscapes, and horizon, blurred figures/subjects and their reflections. Projected on different walls of the 2nd floor hallway and the space between the elevators, the mixture of images produces an encompassing luminescent environment that appears at once real and illusionary. The first projection occupies the space between the elevators, screening with two cameras the real-time images of people coming in and out of the elevator. While the black-and-white camera is focusing on people's feet and their reflection on the floor, the other, color camera is capturing people's full figures and their reflections on the floor. Since one camera is flipped down while recording and the other is manipulated by computer the projected images are also flipped, meaning that images of the actual body-movements are on the bottom and their reflective images are on the top. Moreover, the fact that the floor of the entire 2nd floor also has highly reflective surface contributes to yet another doubling or extension of reflections: from the wall projection to the the surrounding space. This play of reflections continues in the set of two other projections displayed on the corner walls of the long hallway so that the second projection mirrors/reflects the first. Here the pre-recorded imagery of vast un/known landscapes blends in with those of water, sunlight, shadows, people and their reflections, creating a space that erases a borderline between physical appearances and fantasies. However, every time the color camera in the space between the elevator is activated, recoding live images of people coming in and out, the same footage is played back with 3 second-delay and is split into two projections on the corner walls (so that the second mirrors/reflects the first), allowing oneself to see the self reflection but also the reflections of others entering the same space. Lastly, three vertical projections are presented on another long wall of the hallway. Functioning like a large triptych they are playing the pre-recoded images of the empty hallway and its reflections and the artist body in motion and her reflections, exploring the experience of (self)reflection, and the idea of mirroring of the self and the surrounding. Indeed, Ponce's multi-part video installation Subject, Horizon, Reflection is an embodiment of reflectivity, altering an ordinary walk-way space into its poetic, dream-like reflection. |
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inSite_05Multimedia Installation Scenarios / Video&Sound / Ellipsis /
Curator: Hans Fjellestad Artists: Damon Holzborn, Liisa Lounila, Magaly Ponce, Ivan Díaz Robledo First Residency, November 2004 Second Residency, March 2005 Third Residency, September 2005 Every image is surrounded by an atmosphere of world. Sartre “There will be no recital formality, no successive presentation of independent pieces, but rather the collective sculpting of an event, the formation and building of a community. Artist collaborators will perform from within the collective space, rejecting the traditional stage/house orientation and artist as author/hero mythology. The audience is considered an active participant and must be given meaningful access to the “public” discourse – the engagement-avoidance binary alone is not a meaningful mode of interaction in this context.” Curatorial Statement Excerpt |
REMAINSWallace L. Anderson Gallery
& Maxwell Library Bridgewater State College February 14th-March11th 2005 |
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This exhibit explores the relationship between fear and desire. In the tradition of Lysistrata, Ponce uses some humor to reflect on love and war, and wholeness and fragmentation. The artist is intrigued by how small scale ‘personal moments’ can have a larger and more powerful presence when grouped together, or accumulated over time. The desegregation of the body in a formal sense allows the coverage of a bigger psychological and physical space. By this act of dispersion, transcendence is achieved.
It consists of small hair sculptures, suspended in the center of the Library atrium, and three video loops projected on a video screen and floors. Five 3 by 8 digital prints and 24 2x5 prints of Japanese paper are suspended from the florescent lights on the second floor as containers for an image. There are 24 lights of 47 by 21 inches app. In the gallery there is frequency sounds of the US (50Mhz) and Chilean (60 MHz) electric current.
5-Traverse Gallery:
(Outerspace Gallery, Feb. 14-March 14, opening reception Feb. 13, 6-8pm) In this installation, Magaly Ponce explores microscopic moments -- tiny electronic parts, textiles, and ephemeral images -- magnified onto expansive Japanese rice paper scrolls and delicate video sequences. At this startling scale, mundane images give way to lyrical, metaphorical landscapes. Magaly Ponce is a Providence-based artist originally from Chile. She is best-known for her multimedia installations and video art, featured recently at The Lisbon Village Festival in Portugal, a video retrospective at The RISD Museum, SoundScape 2007, and a commission for inSite 05 at the San Diego-Tijuana border crossing, among many others. Her work has been funded by the Rockefeller, MacArthur and Lampadia Foundations, and a Fulbright grant.
It consists of small hair sculptures, suspended in the center of the Library atrium, and three video loops projected on a video screen and floors. Five 3 by 8 digital prints and 24 2x5 prints of Japanese paper are suspended from the florescent lights on the second floor as containers for an image. There are 24 lights of 47 by 21 inches app. In the gallery there is frequency sounds of the US (50Mhz) and Chilean (60 MHz) electric current.
5-Traverse Gallery:
(Outerspace Gallery, Feb. 14-March 14, opening reception Feb. 13, 6-8pm) In this installation, Magaly Ponce explores microscopic moments -- tiny electronic parts, textiles, and ephemeral images -- magnified onto expansive Japanese rice paper scrolls and delicate video sequences. At this startling scale, mundane images give way to lyrical, metaphorical landscapes. Magaly Ponce is a Providence-based artist originally from Chile. She is best-known for her multimedia installations and video art, featured recently at The Lisbon Village Festival in Portugal, a video retrospective at The RISD Museum, SoundScape 2007, and a commission for inSite 05 at the San Diego-Tijuana border crossing, among many others. Her work has been funded by the Rockefeller, MacArthur and Lampadia Foundations, and a Fulbright grant.
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CONCURRING CITIES AND A CICADACurator: Olivia Lahs-Gonzales
Lucy and Stanley Lopata Sculpture Garden The Sheldon Art Galleries September 2003 to May 2004 The exhibit integrates poetic texts applied to the surface of nine windows surrounding the sculpture garden with a sound composition of cicadas and other ambient sounds. Ponce’s piece engages the viewer directly by “speaking” to them through the applied text, but also utilizes the “world beyond the windows” of The Sheldon by integrating the window reflections of the urban environment outside the Sheldon. The whole is a complex poetic and layered response to the building’s architecture, the experience of place and the viewer’s relationship to the work. Located in the glass atrium area between The Sheldon Art Galleries and The Sheldon Concert Hall, the installation presents a metaphoric space where the “Ear and the Eye” meet. The work is a poetic reflection on the space and its architectural, perceptual, historic, social, political, mythic and spiritual implications. The artist’s observations are meshed with the viewer’s physical perception of the space (subjective vision, touch and hearing) and the objective space (brick, city limits, etc.) The installation promotes an inquisitive and interactive process and through the combination of Ponce’s poetic text, sound, spatial and visual interactions asks the viewer to find resonating interconnections between personal and public histories. |
FOLLOW THE HIGHWAYAug.18th 2001, 12:00hrs - Sept. 22nd 2001
This project first began when I found seventy-two small scale chest x-rays of mine workers dated from 1977 in an office of the Victoria, an abandoned nitrate mining town in the Northern desert of Chile. These x-rays inspired me to make a project that dealt with the cycle of exploiting the desert in order to live, but also to eventually die there. The town I was born, Maria Elena, became a ghost town just like Victoria as a result of this same struggle. This installation is inspired on 78 chest x rays of mine workers found at the nitrate mine of Victoria. This town was abandoned and the medical records were on a room with no ceiling, pilled up among thousands of papers. The project "Follow the Highway" is a room with 150 light boxes of which 78 are chest x rays and the rest are boxes that resemble a desert landscape. In the center of the room there is two monitors face to face, where one displays a lung operation, and the other a salt mine explosion. The principal idea is that the exploitation occurs mutually. Ironically, while man extracts the resources from the earth, the desert is extracting the resources from the man: his life and energy. Furthermore, we can think of the earth and the man as being made from the same material. Neruda used to say that ‘ the stones are the bones of the earth’. Manuel de Landa, in his analysis of the ‘mineralization’ in living organisms 500 million years ago offers a view complementary to Neruda’s, that the stones are the bones of man. The earth, like the human body, bears marks or scars that define its identity and reveal its history. These marks manifest themselves both physically and psychologically for example, the presence of minerals and metals give the hills their color and the mining projects modify its shape. In addition, its history creates a psychological atmosphere like the massacre of Santa Maria and the ‘disappeared’ of Pisagüa. Finally, the desert bears the marks of the artist, from the indigenous pictograms on the sides of the mountains to the artistic interventions of Eugenio Dittborn Lotty Rosenfeld and Raúl Zurita. All of these marks are part of the Chilean desert landscape, which I use in my work, emphasizing the ephemeral, minuscule and yet important nature of our presence in the earth. |
Items: 144 light boxes with 72 lung x-rays, 72 landscape on Japanese paper, 500 test tubes. 3 min. salt mine explosion and 8 min. lung operation video.
Sponsors:
Gobierno de Chile Secretaría Regional Ministerial de Bienes Nacionales, Región de Valparaíso. Gobierno de Chile Secretaría Regional Ministerial de Gobierno, Región de Valparaíso. Imprenta El Mercurio de Valparaíso. |
AMHERST/VALPARAISO
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SCALAChile 2000
Former male prison complex, Ex-Cárcel is now a cultural center. This is an installation piece at a prison building closed two years ago in Valparaíso. It intends to bring the outside to the inside. The second cell contains the sound of the ocean, which is about ten blocks away but it was not visible for the inmates. This project was organized by the Universidad de Playa Ancha, which invited the international group Scala to participate. The inauguration was on the 30th of December. 
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INTIMACY
USA 1998
Installation creates a space where the intimate becomes a spectacle. The collapse of the image in both surfaces of a panel, on a back to back projection, uses the liminal dimension of video. The sound encompasses a hidden audience, and includes the visiting audience as part of them. |
OVERWAGEUSA 1997
This is an installation piece that sets a parallel between American's consumptive habits and chilean minimum wage. |