BASE REMOVED :: LIBBI PONCE
TEMPUS PROJECTS
APRIL 20 - MAY 18, 2023
MEMBERS COCKTAIL HOUR :: THURSDAY, APRIL 20 @ 6-7PM (BECOME A MEMBER)
OPENING RECEPTION :: THURSDAY, APRIL 20 @ 7-9PM
Tempus Projects presents BASE REMOVED, a solo exhibition by Libbi Ponce. BASE REMOVED collects a series of sculptures produced over two years by Libbi Ponce, born in Tampa, Florida, to Ecuadorian parents. Since 2021, Ponce, recipient of a Fulbright scholarship, scanned a series of pieces from the archaeological collection of the Anthropological and Contemporary Art Museum with the teams of the Acess 3D Lab of the University of South Florida. Around the same year, online art forums were filled with reflections on the situation surrounding monuments in major cities around the world: pieces of sculpture vitally important to national narratives had been toppled, incinerated, and sunk, while the art world tried desperately to give a homogeneous response to the facts. The city, which through multiple objects of different scales has been establishing edifying stories of power structures, was being confronted by multiple axes that demanded a claim, an erasure, or simply an adjustment on what is visible and what stands tall.
These events brought with them a reinterpretation of empty space, the place occupied by the memory of what was once a public sculpture that was difficult to inhabit, digest, and ignore. There is now an inevitable dialogue that surrounds monumentality, a quality that makes our objects representative, conjunctural. To start talking about it, it is necessary to cover the role of the relationship between visuality and visibility. Why is that which genuinely tells us something about where we come from and who we are so out of the picture, and why does nothing around us refer us to that?
Ponce's work allows an approach to questions about how proper a sculptural body can be. Her works are the product of a series of practices, from the work ethic in digital spaces to mythology and archaeological revisionism as a lexicon for the creation of symbols. The artist's work puts zoomorphic sculptures created from pieces belonging to the multiple pre-Columbian cultures of the Ecuadorian coast in dialogue with altered video installations of their scanning process, to produce sensory extraction in search of an aura.
Ponce's work is situated, partially, in the branch of new media that she works with in the construction of worlds. The influence that the ability to rotate, magnify, distort, and contrast digital elements has on earthly practice is present in the pieces. In a bold and delicate way, the artist acquires an agency that, by replicating the scales of the spaces she wants to occupy, locates desires and possibilities for a new symbolic production. This is how virtuality operates (Pierre Lévy), not as an antonym of "real" nor as a synonym of "imaginary," but essentially virtuous.
BASE REMOVED is the product of Ponce’s relationship with the pieces in the reserve. The work with the zoomorphic, the domestic object, and those floras and faunas that make mythologies possible are vehicles to enrich those stories that somehow guide us in heterodox ways, or that are simply not interested in the field of morality. The sculptures, which appeal to the vernacular forms of local archaeological pieces, are also an opportunity to investigate the specificity of each one. Finally, this installation situates stories that require the viewer time to unravel the complex experiences of the diaspora and second-generation immigrants in the face of the idea of identity and self. Ponce's work uses the distance that exists between us and those figures as a fertile space for questions, fears, and the multiple natures of memories that structure their own polysemic story, nonlinear, and blurry, but substantially honest.
BASE REMOVED is sponsored in part by the State of Florida Department of State, Division of Arts and Culture, the Florida Council on Arts and Culture, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Tempus Projects is located at 1624 E. 7th Ave. in Ybor City.
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Tempus Projects is dedicated to nurturing established and emerging local, national, and international artists through exhibitions, collaborations, residencies, and events. Our non-profit organization promotes artists working in all media, and develops, organizes, and hosts exhibitions that engage the Tampa Bay community through the arts.
Our vision is to foster a vibrant and critical arts nexus that connects grassroots efforts to an international arts dialogue through innovative, equitable programming. Tempus Projects is committed to inclusion, accessibility, collaboration, innovation, and integrity.
