Tula Plumi / GROUND BASS
03.11. 2023–31.01.2024
ARCH
5 Gkoura street
Athens 10558
Athens 10558
Installation images: Photographer: Paris Tavitian
ARCH is pleased to announce the exhibition Ground Bass, by artist Tula Plumi.
Ground Bass presents a series of bamboo works. Long and flexible reeds are joined together to create larger surfaces that accommodate other materials such as painted metal pieces, paper cut-outs, fabric, thread and light.
The works as a whole consist of closed or open surfaces that mimic the morphology of architectural elements such as the roof, dome, arch, column and more. Light floor works evoke the shape of a column, while individual elements of the works reveal influences from lines and forms seen in design. Indentations, projections, curved surfaces or flat, complex or simplified also refer to images of movement and gestures. The objects, as extensions of the self, allude to situations indirectly connected to the human body, such as clothing oneself and putting on make-up.
On a secondary reading, the focus shifts to the patterns, design and color palette. Rhomboid patterns of clothing fabrics are transformed into painted motifs on thin sheets of bent metal. The color palette of a painted eye is imprinted on a sculptural surface. Textiles dress up skeletons of bamboo wood. Patterns run throughout the exhibition. Structures and shapes are persistently repeated over and over again. Repetition helps to improve, emphasize or ultimately understand. Or not understand. It needn’t necessarily resonate. The action of repetition becomes a visual code that conveys meaning and nonmeaning.
The exhibition borrows its title from the term Ground Bass, which comes from music and dance and refers to the continuous repetition of a shape, theme or movement that coexists simultaneously with the development of other themes and movements, more complex and free.