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Critical Practice

Luis Tapia

Chilean-Australian artist whose work studies semiotic lapses between fiction and reality. Often uses narrative to explore the transience of meaning and authenticity. He suspects we have all been here before.

Luis Tapia

Luis Tapia works conceptually with sculpture, installation, performance and lens-based media. An interest in myth, identity and becoming informs a study into narratives of authority. Who decides which stories are told, how does this framing of history coalesce into a cultural subconscious, and what spaces remain against the shadow of this monolith? Misinterpretation, multiplicity and counterfactuals serve the dual purpose of revealing this narrativization of reality as an unreliable surplus, but also cleaves open a space for a new semiotics to emerge, one that is able to speak in multiple tounges and perspectives without contradiction, one founded on a more empathic and parallax understanding of perception.

This work references the misremembered, the lies that conjure truth, the perforations that exist between fiction and reality, all against the backdrop of a profound absence, an estrangement of one’s own narrative, a suspicion that perhaps our story is being told for us - more crucially, it might be being told against us. It is in this centre of meaning we find ourselves, however this meaning is embodied and disembodied threefold; from the outside in.

Curriculum Glossolalia
Curriculum Glossolalia
Curriculum Glossolalia
Curriculum Glossolalia

Medium:

Multimedia Installation; sculpture, video, audio
Myths of the Masters: Laocoon and his Sons
Myths of the Masters: The Annunciation, with St.Emidius

Part of a series of short video tours. Created to accompany physical walking tours while the lockdown was restricting access to galleries and museums.

Walking as Controlled Falling

Three channel video collage. Micro and telescopic perspectives linking natural, technological and historical events. A study of trespassing, bodily limits, and suspended animation.

Part of Another World is Possible.

The Imagined Distance between an Arrow Fired and an Arrow Landed
The Imagined Distance between an Arrow Fired and an Arrow Landed
The Imagined Distance between an Arrow Fired and an Arrow Landed
The Imagined Distance between an Arrow Fired and an Arrow Landed
The Imagined Distance between an Arrow Fired and an Arrow Landed
The Imagined Distance between an Arrow Fired and an Arrow Landed
The Imagined Distance between an Arrow Fired and an Arrow Landed
The Imagined Distance between an Arrow Fired and an Arrow Landed
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Medium:

Live performance