Emilia Shine captures fragments – which make up her paintings – of reality, imagination, the internet, to make them a repertoire of perpetual narration. Based on a staggered temporality, each of her creations has neither beginning nor end.

 

Painting plays the main role here. The canvas, simultaneously the source and the destination, unites the act of a story that can be translated into written scenarios, sound stories, or animated images.

 

Emilia Shine’s archive feeds on the visible and the imaginary, or – more precisely – on the multiple transcriptions and representations of them by consciousness and beliefs, but also – externally – by media and technologies.

 

For Emilia Shine, the internet is a field for the condensation of information.

On the internet, the artist captures and classifies the fragments of a story, which she then reconstructs on a digital screen, where the scene is generated and experienced. From the screen, the collage of ‘clues’ is fixed on the canvas. Here, the gesture, the pictorial material and the substrate freeze the figures and their intentions. At this moment – once the painting is finished – the artist can decide to liberate/emancipate the subject, to rework and reproduce the scene using technological tools, proceeding backwards: from the substrate to the screen; from the pictorial image to the digital image.

 

Emilia Shine’s creations are shots that follow each other, continue each other and coexist in relation to each other. The sequences of a tale that extends into a soft/supple temporality. A chain of events without order, like the flow of memories made available to our consciousness according to the experienced moment, combining sensations, feelings, perversions, and inputs, both internal (experiences, relationships, actions) and external (images, videos, information).

 

Correspondence and attractions play a central role in Emilia’s production.

Material, figurative, dreamlike, surreal, flowing. The atmosphere in her paintings induces a shift. The reason lies, perhaps, in the set of emblems and objects, in this kind of script which does not impose its meaning. The skin of these imperfect, sloppy, indifferent characters, who seem to exude the warmth of the space from which we perceive them, approaches (or clings to?) the objects and elements of the scenes that they inhabit. They smoke cigarettes, they talk on the phone, they look at each other through a mirror, in scenarios troubled by incongruous details: a piece of meat, a cake, a cross. The clues bounce from one side of the scene to the other, following the weft of an unknown pattern.

 

Emilia does not suggest the exegesis of her story because no single interpretation exists. It is up to the eye to reread this story, to give it an order, a meaning – or otherwise –, according to the spectator’s experience and consciousness.

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Emilia Shine’s exhibition interprets the transition of the UNBOXING project towards works that exist for and via the digital medium. It also interprets the notion of archive and the non-temporality specific to the virtual space.

 

UNBOXING 4 is an emerging exhibition, which gradually occupies a pre-existing or non-existent digital space. Emilia Shine’s work takes on multiple forms and formats (visual, textual, sound). The project gradually lengthens, layer after layer, to shape this body – a perpetual narrative.

 

Neither beginning nor end, like memory, which records events, objects and entities from long before we were born. A malleable soil, where realities and imaginaries meet, where information mixes or is forgotten (more or less consciously) under layers of other interpretations; ready to reappear via other channels: dreams, travel, conversations.

 

The artist’s work is located at the intersection of these entities. In the hybridisation between lived experience, ancient and contemporary mythologies, and the internet as a source of visual, sound and textual information. These fragments, placed next to each other, generate the shots of the story which are destined to move from the screen to the canvas. Emilia does not seek a meaning, a sense, or a subject for these paintings, she decomposes the symbols between life and dreams. She establishes “communicating vessels” (as Breton did before her) between real or imaginary characters and architectures, between tangible and digital phenomena.

 

Emilia Shine’s project contaminates Unboxing through its distribution in a fluid/elastic temporality. First of all, each of Emilia’s works can be considered to be a fragment of an unfinished story. Each of her paintings is the sentence of a story that leads to the next scene, without any discernible, finite meaning.

 

Unboxing 4 - Emilia Shine is composed of three parts: incipit, clues, epilogue.

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The exhibition “I lost I lost - What? Ah yes - My head” is a perpetual narrative. Incipit and clues succeed each other, before reaching an open epilogue that will potentially lead to a new introduction. Like thoughts that flow one after the other through causal associations to which each person will give the meaning they desire.

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(AD + OdN, trad. JP)