WORKSHOP ON METAPHORICAL SEXUALITY CHELO MATESANZ

08 April 2014 - 10 April 2014
The workshop we propose does not aim to address sexual issues but rather the categories in which society and sexuality have found places to take hold as likenesses in perpetuity. Reconstructing or reinterpreting McLuhan’s quote, we could say that sexuality would be the message.

Let us think about the amount of current examples of advertising in which everyday objects project or adopt sexual suggestive shapes with the clear intention of making them more desirable to the consumer. Sexuality should be understood as a broad and decisive language that establishes modes and models of correspondence, and which evolves along with a society as it becomes collective through technology and new tools for communication.
Language has established standards and codes for a precise understanding of the information it conveys, but the metaphor is the rhetorical figure, the literary device that can alter the meaning of written words, projecting, relating and creating a resemblance where, in principle, none exists.

The workshop will begin with a visit to the exhibition that will be analysed from the perspective of the proposed topic. Next, there will be a conversation about metaphorical sexuality in contemporary art, and different examples and opinions will be looked at and discussed. Following this, the forms of sexual suggestion will be addressed through practice, experimenting in the workshop with building the pieces and analysing the artistic devices each participant intends to use to create his or her own metaphor: objects (or images) whose literalness does not establish naturalistic representations, but rather encircles this sexual ‘charge’ and projects it.

The proposal is open to audiences of all kinds. No previous knowledge of art is required; sharing the codes that all we understand and handle to ‘construct language’ will suffice. The activity that will be carried out in the workshop will be eminently practical and consist of constructing metaphors through situations, objects, images, etc.

The results of the workshop will be exhibited in the CGAC’s Project Space.

Chelo Matesanz

(Reinosa, Spain, 1964), has a degree in Fine Arts specialising in Painting and Audio Visual Arts and a Ph.D. from the University of the Basque Country. She is currently a tenured lecturer of Painting in the School of Fine Arts in Pontevedra (University of Vigo), where she has been teaching for the past 20 years. Her artistic career dates back to activity begun in 1986. Since then, she has held a number of individual and group exhibitions. She was granted the Researchers’ Training and Assistance Scholarship from the Department of Culture, Universities and Research of the Basque Government and the scholarship of the Marcelino Botín Foundation, Santander. She took part in the Young Art Exhibition of the Ministry of Culture and received the JASP Prize for the best young artist at ARCO 96. She has works in collections of different public and private organisations like the Coca-Cola Foundation, the Testimoni Collection, the Murcia Regional Government, Artium or the Galician Contemporary Art Centre.


HOURS
: from 5.00 pm to 8.00 pm

TARGET AUDIENCE
: artists, students of the Fine Arts, Art History, the Humanities, Philosophy, Political Science, Journalism, Publicity, Marketing, Product Design and anyone interested in the visual arts, artistic expression and the topic proposed for the workshop.


PLACES: minimum 10 / maximum 20

REGISTRATION FEE
: 20 €

REGISTRATION


Pre-registration can be done via the form available on this web page, by sending an email to cgac.educacion@xunta.es or by calling the Educational Projects and Activities Service telephones (+ 34 981 546 602 / 631). In any case, applications must include the following information: complete name, your studies, your area of work or interest, and a contact phone number and email.

Once registration has been confirmed, the persons chosen to participate in the workshop will receive directions for completing the registration.


MATERIAL


The CGAC will provide the basic working materials, but the artist suggests that participants bring fabrics, clothing, toys, buttons, beads, fragments of materials that we do not usually pay attention to and which, nevertheless, are part of our environment, things we usually throw away or keep forever to use at some point.


COORDINATION
: Virginia Villar