Ian Ballantyne mostly creates prints and animations. Focusing on repetition and reassembly, he has seen the process of making and the moment of interpretation to be the driving forces behind his work.

ABOUT POLO

Polo is a documented series of mono prints shown as a stop-motion animation. The piece depicts the subject riding a chair while focusing on certain repetitive moments of their gallop around the screen. This repetition mimics the action of the printing process and the plate responsible for making the images, which the viewer catches glimpses of throughout the animation. The imagery, coupled with the sound of the gallop and breath of a Crillo, attempt to add grace and power to an otherwise mundane action.

The video is part of an installation with the 200 prints that compose the piece.

In 2019 FIG Bilbao, International Art on Paper Festival,  reinforced its international character by designating Argentina as a guest country and including the Fundación´ace as one of the invited Argentine institutions. According with this,  the foundation participated in a special project within the fair: the “Cubes of Temptations”. This is an exhibition space made up of 2x2x2 meters wooden cubes where emerging artists and / or advanced students carry out interventions taking as a central theme paper in any of its variants. This section of the fair wants to give visibility, disseminate and enhance emerging artistic practices and are offered as utopian spaces to carry out projects based on works on paper that embrace / coexist / dialogue together with the continent (the wooden cube), which instead it can be transformed into content.

Within this framework, the organizers offered Alicia Candiani, our director, the curatorship of four of the “Cubes of Temptations”. The proposal was a very welcome challenge for Alicia, completely  alined with her theoretical and practical explorations about the expansion of the limits of artistic practices that involve print media and art on paper, that both have been developed within our residency program. In the selection process, she focused on artists  who had worked (whether on scholarships, in residences or with specific projects) in any of the different Proyecto´ace programs, in such a way that our participation expressed our vision of contemporary graphics and at the same time showed pieces produced in our workshops where we work collaboratively.

The final selection included Laurel Ponturo, Ian Ballantyne, Juan Reos and Micaela Muzi. The artists were then asked to make a new installation proposal for the cubes based on what they produced with us, recommending consider the cubes as a space to intervene and not simply as a container to hang the work. The selected artists were invited to travel to Bilbao to make their interventions, participated in all the associated activities, gave workshops and competed for the Temptation Cubes Award, which was finally awarded to Micaela Muzi, one of our invited artists, with a project carried out during her residency in ´ace at the beginning of the same year.