Patricia Esquivias -- Reads like the Paper, 2005 - 2009
April 4, 2009 - June 20, 2009

This April and May, the Madrid-based artist Patricia Esquivias presents Reads like the Paper, 2005 - 2009 at Midway Contemporary Art. In this ongoing video project, which began in 2005, the artist has created vignettes that collage seemingly disconnected images and video footage with Esquivias’ poetic narrations. The short chapters that comprise Reads Like the Paper provide cursory glimpses into an imaginative space that the artist has carved out for reflection and speculation about generalized and specific quotidian events that comprise our lives.

Like her other work, Reads Like the Paper, 2005 - 2009 uses low-fi video techniques of storytelling that mine a personal archive of images. The camera is relatively stable, focusing on static pictures and flickering video images from her laptop. Sometimes her hand intrudes into the frame to flip over a photo or to instructively animate an image with the use of a pointer. The artist uses this sparse environment as a point of departure for contemplative and imaginative musings. In certain truncated segments, it appears she is remembering some vague and distant memory; at other times she will elaborate a story and then state, "perhaps I should explain this again," carefully retelling it as if to remind the viewer that these seemingly disconnected tales are worth consideration. In contrast to her more historically-minded projects Folklore I and Folklore II, which provided the more linear structure of a lecture, Reads Like the Paper, 2005 - 2009's fragmentary nature offers a wide range of subject matter that coalesces to create a hypnotic meditation upon familial relationships, homelessness, uncertain political action, and forgotten elements of our urban environment.

Patricia Esquivias was born in 1979 in Caracas. She received her BA at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, London, and her MFA at California College of Arts, San Francisco. In the past few years, Esquivias has exhibited at the Kunstverein Frankfurt; White Columns, New York; Murray Guy, New York; Museo Raúl Anguiano, Guadalajara, México; Matrix Program, Berkley; and the 2008 Berlin Biennale. She is a recent recipient of the EASTinternational Award and the Illy Present Future Award at Artissima 2007 in Turin, Italy. This spring she will participate in the New Museum’s Younger than Jesus survey. She is represented by Murray Guy in New York.