Eloise Ghioni was born just across the Italian border in Switzerland in 1978. So if Switzerland had the same laws as the United States, the artist would be Swiss, but as it stands, Switzerland doesn’t have the same laws regarding place of birth, nor perhaps, should it. The point is that Ghioni was born into a situation of territorial ambiguity and like many people born on borders - place, memory, identity, and ideas regarding one’s relationship to space become primary ideas of artistic/life exploration. Ghioni’s research might thus be broadly described as relating to the charting of territory: both intellectual and physical.

A good example of such mapping occurred in May 2009 in an installation where the artist suspended two mural size sheets of rice paper horizontally in a space existing between the floor and the ceiling. Fundamentally, then, what Ghioni did was to place another ceiling in-between two easily recognizable planes. Yet, the mid-level ceiling she introduced was not fixed or rigid but rather ephemeral and transparent. Intermittently, there were also geometric patterns and concentric circles placed atop the paper in soft tones with the occasional hint of color. The result was that as the viewer walked through the ‘corridor’ sunlight streaming in from the window, geometric pattern, and wall/ceiling/floor all became elements that intermingled to form an uplifting, rather positive reflection on space and existence in a shared place (in this case Galleria neon>campobase in Bologna).

What Ghioni has proposed for Waterline at SRISA Gallery is both related and drastically different from the installation just described. The similarities have much to do with the fact that both installations deal with suspending material to a very delicate point of tension; a balance where the work is easily destroyed by the collapsing of a support holding the material temporarily in place. The most obvious difference being that a viewer is not able to move through the space but is rather invited to look and see the installation from several different points of view including: the gallery window and the two doorways that lead into the gallery proper.

The artist also places a strong emphasis on the duality between the emptiness of the white gallery and the fullness that is simultaneously created by the horizontal bands traversing the space, or even vice versa with the gallery representing fullness and the horizontal bands idealizing the void. A situation of stasis is invoked, which encourages the idea of time as infinite to take form. Slowness, concentration, and awareness of time, then, become deciding factors in our perception of all the different elements present in the installation, clearly reminding us that although we are in the same space-place our perceptions of it differ based on the simple act of changing our point of view.

Andrew Smaldone