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Another Name for Everywhere
Southern Alberta Art Gallery
Curator Christina Cuthbertson
Dec 3, 2016 - Feb 5, 2017

How do we relate to things that are unnamed or unnamable? What happens at the perceptual limits of human thought, consciousness, and comprehension? Throughout her practice, Miruna Dragan engages these questions, peeling back at the glimmering edges where language, object, and reason overlap with the unknown. With an ongoing interest in metaphysics, Dragan's site-responsive work reflects themes of dispersion, immanence, and transcendence. Operating within and between various modes of studio research including drawing, lens-based media, site-specific intervention, and others, she interprets surreal geographies through the reanimation of archetypes, myths, and symbols.

An obfuscation of language liberates us from fixed meaning. Much like a mantra or semantic satiation, where the repetition of a sound, word, or phrase renders it either profoundly sacred or utterly meaningless. Dragan's work brings us to this fluid space where bewilderment and epiphany find common ground. In a recent body of work, Dragan uses logic symbols to create works that flirt with paradox and render time subordinate. Used in mathematics to represent common functions such as 'therefore,' 'if-then,' 'there exists,' Dragan strings together functions without a subject to create infinitely cyclical statements: ...because there exists another name for everywhere it is possible therefore it is true when either or both are true because there exists another name for everywhere... She abstracts word into symbol, and language into pure logical function to map an impossible territory where meaning is emancipated from designation.

Throughout her practice, Dragan excavates the liminal spaces between seemingly opposing conditions - Everywhere is simultaneously all places, and no singular place; light and shadow create enveloping works that occupy space without physical mass or volume; anachronisms abound in pieces that elaborate on ancient and contemporary techniques and philosophies; and meaning is untethered from language - she bends these conditions in on themselves, creating a space for reconciliation between faith and reason.

Light enters the dark, seeping through impossible density, to find us here groping at the edges of comprehension. The space is a cave, a chapel, a gallery - it is the ultimate fertile void, where objects may transcend their profane nature to become vehicles or portals for the exploration of other dimensions. In Another Name for Everywhere, Miruna Dragan invites us to stand with her at this precipice, to encounter the unknown, and to leap freely without expectation.

--- Curator Christina Cuthbertson

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