Ilaria Ortensi
My work originates from the experience of contemporary space. What I’m interested in is how contemporary architecture and the proliferation of its images can impact our subjectivity and collective imagination. The series Night Still, 2013, and Windows, 2014, refer to existing places, away from each other but linked to the same modernist inspired architecture. Night Stills displays paper copies of actual buildings, recently developed in the surroundings of Rome, Italy. In this project I have focused on volumes and proportions to recreate an urban environment immersed in the same atmosphere of certain Italian movies of the ‘60s, where the massive postwar urbanization was in the backdrop. In Windows I focused on the surface and erased the volume to achieve a proliferation of shapes. I have started with photographing the facades of Donal Trump’s luxury condos, along the East side of Manhattan, which I then turned into modular woodblocks and arranged them to create new shapes. Both works imply an exercise of deconstruction and reconstruction of existing places, in the attempt to investigate the relationship between the architectural space and the space and time of subjectivity. www.ilariaortensi.com
