Blind Carbon Copy: An Open Love Letter

Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery | Auckland

Curated by Ioana Gordon-Smith

19 May – 5 August 2018 | Solo Show

Exhibition Text:

Gabrielle Amodeo is a Wellington-based multi-media artist who is interested in the space between things and how they are represented. Her work often takes what is familiar and alters it, removing some elements and highlighting others. These acts test how meaning travels and unravels, considering what is lost and gained during transmission. 

For Blind Carbon Copy: An Open Love Letter, Amodeo delves into the representation and evidence of intimacy. Working autobiographically, two new works consider how to describe a relationship. In The days we’ve been together (2018), individual sheets of paper index each date of the artist’s 14-year relationship with her husband, beginning on Saturday, 25th October 2003. Presented in stacks of 365 sheets, the work experiments with how you might ‘see’ the duration of a relationship.

Working with existing objects and sound, To essay (a relationship) (2018) reverses the enquiry; what importance do the things accumulated over the course of a relationship hold? Presented both as mute objects and the subject of an audio essay, they fan out into a multitude of relationships: to their own provenance, to their function in the artist’s house and relationship, to the viewer’s own conjured connotations. The audio essay itself has its own logic and is subject both to the singular moment of the spoken work and a linear flow, from beginning to end.

The logic of the material things, the placeholders used to acknowledge and commemorate romantic relationships, becomes the common concern across the exhibition. In delving into how these things operate, Amodeo reflects on both the inevitable inadequacy and the poignant romance of that which can’t be captured or represented in material form, except, perhaps, through its absence.

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Photos by Sam Hartnett, Courtesy of Te Uru