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Johanna Unzueta’s work has consistently engaged with laboral practices as they are found in both the studio and the world at large. Central to her practice are issues of social justice, human rights, and an interest in play in its most human sense. In these demonstration placards, originally begun in response to the exhibition Finding Work (The Gallatin Galleries, 2009), the artist works with the raw definitional aspects of language through the International Phonetic Alphabet making demands for a future and a present that is more human. The artist writes:
Could the void be understood as something hidden?
The space left by the emptiness of words in my work could be interpreted as a devoid place, devoid of light.
The association of the void as an infinite space perhaps, like a black hole, makes me think that the act of cutting these words is an act of double meaning. It is possible to create through the same act, from the same image, an antagonistic meaning; the void/light?
Hiding something is not somehow creating a void, a void devoid of light.
By cutting out the words from the felt and transforming them into a banner as a denunciation where the absence of these instead of being a dark void opens a window where the light that passes through these spaces reveals the existence of their meaning, leaving them exposed as the gaze through a crystal.
In a way, it’s like a revelation, but it’s never really been hidden.
The emptiness of a word, the emptiness of a fact.
Johanna Unzueta (b. 1974, Santiago, Chile) lives and works in New York and Berlin. Unzueta’s work spans installation, sculpture, drawing, film, and mural-making. Her practice pays homage to her Chilean upbringing through an engagement in the surrounding communities, landscapes, and histories of Latin America. Unzueta uses common materials such as felt, cotton, recycled wood, paper, thread, and natural pigments to describe a belabored economy impacted by the hierarchy of people and resources. Recent exhibitions include: The Sky’s the Limit, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (2023); In the Studio, Tate Modern, London (2023); Drawing in the Continuous Present, The Drawing Center, New York (2022); Tools for life, Modern Art Oxford (2020) (solo); and From My Head to My Toes, to My Teeth to My Nose, Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (2019) (solo). Unzueta’s work is in the permanent collections of Tate, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Queens Museum, New York; MSU Broad Art Museum, East Lansing; Frac Bretagne, Rennes; and Museo de Artes Visuales, Santiago. In January 2024, Unzueta will present her inaugural solo exhibition at Casey Kaplan, New York.
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