Exhibition: RCA Postgraduate Exhibition School of Arts and Humanities
Location: RCA Battersea, Second Floor, Studio Building, London
Dates: 20/06/2024 - 23/06/2024
During the RCA Graduation Show for the MA Contemporary Art Practice, held from June 17 to 23, 2024, Isabel Merchante displays five projects at various locations. On the exhibition space, second floor of the Studio Building, you will find Rainbow Drawings and documentation of both One Day I Saw the Sunset Ten Thousand Times and Drawings of the Latent Crust. The first, a robotic performance, will be activated during the exhibition week at the Robotics Workshop nearby. The second, an installation placed in the volcanic island of Lanzarote, can only be remembered through photographs. Off-site, It Is - And It Is, is scheduled to be performed on Friday at Gorvy Theatre, and All Light Is From the Past, a light sculpture made of fibre optics, will be visible for the rest of the month at Camden Art Centre as part of the exhibition Future Archaeologies.
The concept of magic hour, the time just after sunset or before sunrise, is explored in these works as a transition moment between opposites—night and day, senses and understanding. This search for liminal spaces and connectivity between realities is a constant in Isabel’s work and is present in the five featured projects. Each uses different materials and techniques, including flame drawings on steel, robotic choreography with AI visuals, photoluminescent stones, optic fibre sculptures, and spoken-word performances. Together, these pieces explore temporal phenomena, moments of transition, and revelation, challenging conventional notions of permanence and stability. Most pieces require the viewer to be present at a specific time. The magic hour serves as a cohesive concept, suggesting a re-imagination of technological advancements and scientific logic in favour of poetry and ambiguity, introducing a renewed perception and thought in a time when humanity’s relationship with Earth is increasingly unstable.
