BEDROCK

Project VIII
BEDROCK
Allegra Pacheco

Private View 9th of September, 6pm
10 White Horse Street, London, W1J 7LJ

Stemming from her spring exhibition ‘MACRO MICRO’, Allegra Pacheco (b. 1986) presents us with BEDROCK a more primal version of her MICRO MACRO world.

Pacheco claims that as radical shifts in science and technology accelerate a traditional sense of self and culture become diluted. Tribal origins are forgotten, heritage and ritual displaced.

In this work, she explores the notion of a cave as an ancient form of hard-drive, where tribal drawings and tapestry function as data archives. A notion that came to her when visiting the Caves of Matopos in South Western Zimbabwe.

She focuses on the notion of caves as prehistoric back-ups, because caves functioned as repositories where Bushmen documented their physical and spiritual lives and thus conserved what would later be culture and tradition. She expands her focus on to other ancient objects like food containers and pots.

The grid, present from Tokyo's tiled buildings, to the traditional mud huts of Burkina Fasso is a unifying language in the works.
Compared with the perfection of the machine-assembled, craft and manual labor stand
out as an emblem of human individuality, an aspect that Pacheco exploits with papier mâché sculptures that resemble digital limbs and primal Tetris blocks.

Her work, constantly informed by her travels, is a meeting point of opposites:
black and white meets color, the traditional past of the African bushmen meets the urban clash of the Asian metropolis; time is warped as the past and the future mash together to form BEDROCK.

The works on display deal with a mixture of hand and machine crafted wares, as
Pacheco stands by the notion that our capacity to make and create is central to that which makes us human.
Insisting in the main use of traditional DIY techniques like papier mâché and shag carpeting she brings forward a naive aesthetic, reminiscent of a set-design landscape, of something not quite real- quirky and animated, yet serious and eloquent.

BEDROCK (a name borrowed from The Flinstones cartoon show) evokes a tour into a modern caveman's dwellings, or a caveman's vision of the future.
A light-hearted dystopia of sorts.