My second post of the week is Marina Font,  an Argentinian photographer who lives and works in Miami. Uprooting and the weight memory has on things are constant themes in her work, as she has shown in Dark Continent and Imprinted.

Today, I am featuring The weight of things.

Marina was born in Cordoba, Argentina in 1970. She studied at Escuela de Artes Visuales Martin A. Malharro, Argentina. She recently had solo exhibitions at The Consulate of Argentina in New York, The Deering Estate at Cutler, Miami, The Gato Gallery, Barry University and The Dina Mitrani Gallery. She has participated in group shows at The Boca Museum of Art, Boca Raton; MoCA, North Miami; The Appleton Museum of Art, Ocala; The Museum of Florida Art, Deland; The Centro Cultural Español; Aluna Art Foundation, Miami; and The Miami center for the Photographic Arts.

Her work is included in the Bunnen Collection, Atlanta, The Girl’s Club Collection of Art, Fort Lauderdale, The LOWE Museum at the University of Miami, Miami Dade College Museum of Art & Design’s Permanent Collection, and various private collections.

I introduce a wonderful artist, Marina Font and her series The weight of things.

The weight of things 

“Si … el nombre es arquetipo de la cosa,
en las letras de rosa está la rosa
y todo el Nilo en la palabra Nilo.”

El Golem J.L. Borges

What happens when the weight of something is determined by other significants? How much does memory, traditions, a life lived or the importance that we attribute to certain things weight, as well as the bridges that connect our experiences with our memories?

For the series El peso de las cosas (The weight of things), I build visual relationships with objects or ensembles that I place on a domestic scale. The scale provides us with information that is precise, physical related to an object. In this case, the scale has been deprived of its capacity of weighting. It functions as a constant visual referent present in every image, and each one of the objects placed on it is poetically connected with what the object represents to me. On top of referring to certain objects that have a specific significant –like the clock to the time- and also the intent to metaphorically reflect over the things that cannot be physically weighted, but those that have a place in our lives and in our path.I intend to represent, or materialize, the weight of the void, of relationships, of unleashed dreams, memories, dependency or all those actions that we repeat every day of our lives without pausing to think or to “weight” them.

El peso de las cosas, my constant search around objects is centered in discovering not only their meaning but also to explore what is the stimuli that connect them to our senses in many different ways. They are things that are used, which we acquire, inherit, preserve, evoke and that contain within history and certain elements that define our existence, among the emotional weight that we attribute to them. While photographing this objects and ideas through the act of virtually weighting them, I explore the capacity that they have to represent beyond their real function, or to symbolize what they represent, opening the possibility for them to suggest new encounters and symbolism in the beholder.