Eva Petrič: An Echo - A Stain
(From the Festival Hall, through the eye, onto the lake's water to the island)
How does music look like? Like musical notes, like dance, like tango.... Piazzolla's tango...my shadows. Astor Piazzolla completed himself with music, me, I complete myself with shadows. Was Piazolla's shadow his music? Always changing, and in all-ways adjustable, always moving - tango? Did he loose or find himself in it? How did it appear to him?
Piazzolla created a musical image by moving musical notes, me, I try to create the image of music by moving my snapshots. I take one to the dark room and let the light move over it - out comes a new image, similarly as the new tune came out from under Piazolla's fingers moving across his bandoneon. My images of shadows seem to me to be the visual images of Piazolla's musical notes. Piazolla would probably hear them as notes that sing tango. If I search for myself in music, I see musical notes as images of shadows, dancing tango. But I would also like to hear them. One must hear tango, not only see it. How can an image be heard? Like a shadow?
Eva Petrič (b.1983 in Slovenia), graduated cum laude 2005 from psychology and art at the Webster University, Vienna, Austria, where she now continues her studies of visual art and plans to complete it with a masters in new media. She devotes her time to writing, photography, video and painting. After spending her childhood and early adolescence in different parts of the world (Ethiopia, India and USA), and before completing high school in New York City, she spent three years at Bled, that were marked by dance. In the summer of 2004 she devoted her time particularly to tango in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
She is the author of four long feature film scripts; for the development of two of these she received grants from The Film Foundation of Slovenia. This autumn her collection of poetry This Space is a Box, illustrated with her photographs, will be published by the publishing house Drava in Austria. Last year Eva Petrič won the Čižek award and the recognition Naj digič 2006 for the short musical digital video Army of me. In 2006 and 2007 she had two solo exhibitions of her paintings and photographs in Vienna, Austria (at the Slovene science institute and at the Corinna Steiner Gallery) and one in New York (at the Hall of St. Cyril), as well as a couple of group exhibitions (at the MOYA - Museum of Young Art Vienna, at the Gallery H 17 and at the gallery Artmark, all in Vienna), while her work was also presented at the 2007 International Art Fair in Prague, Czech republic. The present exhibition at Bled is her first solo exhibition in Slovenia.
Alongside of the exhibition in the foyer of the Festival Hall some of the works of Eva Petrič will be exhibited in the church on the Island and projected on its ceiling as well as on the lake's waters.
"To search for the sacred in the profane challenges me. I catch the profane into my camera and in the dark room my use of light makes possible for the sacred in it to move into full view - the outcome are my 'photo-frescoes'," explains Eva Petrič. "I want to pull them from the sterile environment of an exhibition space out into the natural environment - onto the lake's waters, the art of nature, and into the church on the island - the spiritual space and as such standing as an art piece already by itself. I wonder if my photo-frescoes are as "loud" there as they are within the neutrality of the exhibition space. Will they withstand the test of their confrontation with the power of nature and the power of tradition and spirituality? Will they, I hope, maybe even enhance them?"