Marcela Sinclair is based in Buenos Aires. Sinclair frequently explores themes of displacement and geometry through practices that include sculpture, installation, collaborative works and site-specific interventions. Exhibitions include Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, (2020); Art Basel Cities Buenos Aires at Collins Park, Miami (2019); Museo Sívori, Buenos Aires (2019); MUNTREF, Buenos Aires (2018); Museo Cerralbo, Madrid (2017); Centro Cultural Kirchner, Buenos Aires (2016); Galería Gabriela Mistral, Santiago de Chile, (2014); La Ene en MALBA, Buenos Aires, (2014); Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires, (2013); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Rosario, (2012); Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo, Montevideo, (2012); Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires, (2012). Her most recent solo show was ‘Jewel, escape’ at Galería Mite, Buenos Aires (2018). Residencies include El Basilisco and Lugar a Dudas. Sinclair was awarded the first prize for sculpture from The National Fund for the Arts of Argentina (2017) and has works in public collections at Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes en Neuquén, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Rosario and Museo de Bellas Artes de Salta, Argentina.
Marcela Sinclair, Around the block, 2020. Video 3:48.
Marcela Sinclair’s short video essay Around the block constitutes a way of sharing the game played by the eyes and mind when asked about a subject which, in the process of being reflected upon, becomes an obsession. The question was posed to Sinclair by More Than Ponies and concerns the picturesque, an idea we relate to through Sinclair’s chores and wanderings near water and green leaves, ruins, urban gaps taken over by vegetation or dirt, and the images of historical figures sparked by the names of the streets around the block from her flat: Fitz Roy, Bonpland, Aguirre and Loyola, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representatives of the transformation of nature into science, and the wild into culture.
Sinclair tries to get a glimpse of her local picturesque spots, asking: picturesque to whom? Absurdly, forcedly or naturally picturesque? As she does so, she shares sights, references and illusions that link present and past, colonizers and the colonized, fact and fiction, and her Buenos Aires neighborhood with the UK’s New Forest. Both sites are granted with the unexpected beyond that they come to constitute for each other in this work. Limiting her walk to the 500 metres that she was permitted to travel during the early quarantine, Around the block shows that history and ideas can be traced deep into the holes and cracks of close constructions and land.
- Recorded at the artist´s home and on the streets surrounding the former Comastri house, now Escuela Técnica No. 34. Ing. Enrique Martín Hermitte, Buenos Aires, with additional found footage and landscape video inserts taken from Tele Vista broadcasts shot by Laura Eldret. Comissioned in collaboration with Alejandra Aguado.