Monica Mays
Spain/VISUAL ARTS/
Monica Mays’ work consists of sculptures, performances and archival images. She has a rejected background in cultural anthropology that informs her practice, enmeshing biography, historical archive and mythology. Their pieces often take the shape of animated domestic objects that are spilling over, optically distorted or in the process of transmutation, considering materials and objects through their production and reproduction under consumer systems of production and exchange. She is interested in the potential of excessiveness, ornamentation and exuberance as spaces where states of in-betweenness and opacity of meaning can exist.
PRESENTING
Anamorphosis is an optical illusion made for visualizing obscured images from one single point of view or reflection from the 15th-16thC. They are a byproduct of linear perspective techniques of the period, using geometry and lens-based techniques to distort and encode images rather than clarify them.
In the service of realism, linear perspective renders the world from a singular point in space. However, this is only truly accurate if parallel lines are always straight and right angles exact. As this is not the case, the spread of linear perspective produces a violent and intricate deformation of the shape of things - a human-centred, increasingly familiar ‘optimization’ of reality, where the world is reconfigured from a single point of view as a resource for human projects.
In this context, anamorphosis, often used as a parlour trick or puzzle, is a tamed, domesticated version of pre-perspectival disorientation; an indecipherable image with no frame of reference - until one stands at exactly the correct, singular vantage point and the abstract wilderness resolves into figuration. “Open me, close me” breaks these anamorphic images by overlapping their distortions and rendering them unreadable from any single objectivity.