Secuela

By Ariel Authier

Rosana Schoijett is one of the main artists in her generation working with photography in Argentina. Since the ‘90s she has developed several series which have a strong conceptual approach as well as an exquisite formal resolution. In the past three years she has temporarily moved away from capturing photographic images in order to focus on making collages using photographs printed in vintage high quality books. For this purpose she searches second-hand bookstores to find several copies of the same coffee-table book, often devoted to images of art or nature, which are beautifully printed on velvety papers. She then builds laborious pieces overlapping cut-outs from the same page from these different copies of one published title. They are hand- sewn to create 3-D relief, and often framed in three hinged glass panels, resembling altarpieces, which allows the viewing of the threads that hold the collage together on the back of each page. As a photographer working in the digital age, she became interested in the book as fetish and in a method of production that deliberately ignores anything digital. She is also compelled to revisit the long standing tradition, from surrealism to neo-conceptualism, of women artists making collages.

Nora Fisch gallery-Untitled Art Fair, Miami Beach, December 2015.