Elena Radice: Abstract Season Changes

On May 25, 2013, the project Abstract Season Changes (2012 – ongoing), by artist Elena Radice will be presented at Link Point in a site-specific exhibition setup. Abstract Season Changes (http://abstractseasonchanges.tumblr.com/) is a collection of geometrical abstract pictures gathered from Google Maps, showing how the system often combines satellite images depicting the same landscape in different seasons.

 

 

Google Maps are made of several satellite pictures shot in a long time period and clustered together to let us explore and navigate through the Earth. It is exactly in this complex process of combining images that some inconsistency can happen, and that’s what Elena Radice finds out during her journeys. The artist started to focus on what she calls “joints” – the junction points where, say, a snowy mountain meets its green sunny summer version – emphasizing the aesthetic and visual value of these images, framing and collecting her screen shots.
This kind of discrepancies work like a powerful antidote able to open our eyes and show us what we really see when we navigate on Google Maps, reminding us that what we are observing is actually a map, a representation of reality, and not reality itself. And it is exactly in this moment that some satellite pictures stitched together by some special image processing algorithms returns to look like abstract painting compositions. But the images collected by Elena Radice are not just that: they are also a powerful representation of time, and a comment on what she calls the useless effort of keeping memories.
A selection of these images will be exhibited at the Link Point, displayed in various set-ups and formats.
 
Elena Radice (http://leraneacide-portfolio.tumblr.com) lives, works and studies between Milan, Genève and the Internet. Starting from a “being user” condition, she builds objects in evolution whose shapes translate themselves into one another. She keeps track of these ongoing processes on http://leraneacide.tumblr.com, a blog followed – for some odd reasons – by 82.173 people.

 

 

“That’s the idea that pictures from satellites have given us: we can look from above, we can see the world the way it is, its truth. But is it true?”
Elena Radice

“Thanks to an odd discovery, we have a new way to watch the world change before our eyes. It’s called Abstract Season Changes, and it’s a Tumblr, and it’s amazing.”
Oliver Miller on Thought Catalog

“She came to think about the satellite pictures more aesthetically, framing her screen shots to compose images that look almost like modernist abstract art. Now she uploads the results to a mesmerizing Tumblr blog that she calls Abstract Season Changes.”
Emily Badger on Co.Exist