Tamara García presents her work Cala Ricardo at the Faro de Cabo Mayor Art Center.
Santander 18-03-22. The Art Center Faro de Cabo Mayor (CAFCM), under the Port Authority of Santander, will show, from tomorrow Saturday until May 15, the exhibition "Cala Ricardo" of the Cantabrian artist Tamara Garcia. A project that brings together a selection of images, photographic archives, documents and a 1:20,000 scale map of a small cove, known as Cala Ricardo, located on the northwestern border of the municipality of Santander.
The president of the Port Authority, Francisco Martin, who has already visited the exhibition with the author, stressed that the exhibition "flies over the spirit of three people", that of Tamara Garcia herself, her father, Ricardo, to whom she dedicates this work as a memory of his activism "in the care and protection of a wonderful piece of the Cantabrian coast" and the British botanist Anna Atkins, author of the first book of photographs.
For her part, Tamara García has also highlighted the fact that she wanted to pay tribute both to her father "since he was the one who took care of this cove" and to Atkins "the first person to make a book of photographs in which she also used the cyanotype technique", which is precisely the one on which the author is based in this exhibition.
The cyanotype is one of the first photographic techniques, based on contact or direct copying of a negative with which copies are obtained in Prussian blue, made known by the British botanist Anna Atkins (1799-1871) in what is now considered the first book of photography (British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions), published in 1843. This monochrome procedure allows her to generate images of an intense and deeply symbolic blue, with which she evokes the work of her father, the painter Ricardo Chanete (1943-2020), who was a sentinel of this stretch of coast as a member of the European Coastwatch program - the artist herself is also part of this project - and who, for years, was caring for, cleaning and conditioning this cove. Curiously, Anna Atkins also dedicated her first book to her father.
Tamara García collects and analyzes the geological environment while delving into her own memory. As Anna Atkins did almost two centuries ago, she collects samples of the marine vegetation she discovered with her father, particularly the algae (calocas, sea lettuce, shaving brushes, sea asparagus, mosses, brainworts, anemones, luminaries and sponge algae that, according to Ricardo, "taste like barnacles"), as well as the shells, wood, leaves, feathers, hair and animal remains that dot this small habitat, but also the plugs, alveolar films, mermaid tears or pellets and a whole repertoire of microplastics that identify the trace that humans have been leaving in the landscape.
The artist arranges all this material on photosensitive papers that she then records in cyanotypes that she obtains by building her own sunscreen or exposing them directly to sunlight. She also documents the life of an intertidal pool where different species of plants, animals, fungi and protists coexist, showing the strange symbiosis that occurs on the border between sea and land, while transforming the vision of the micro into macro, as the geological and the biological are confused with the astronomical, providing us with a poetic rupture of scales that expands the confines of our imagination.
Multidisciplinary artist, Tamara García (Santander, 1980) has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country and a diploma in Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art. She completed her training at the Berkeley Academy in California and in the Eurodyssée Program of the Center for Studies, Conservation and Restoration of the Azores. He has received the Plastic Arts Award from the Government of Cantabria in 2020, as well as the Young Courage of Cantabria Award and the First Prize in the categories of installation and photography of the Pancho Cossío National Art Contest in 2013 and 2015. In addition to the work he develops individually, he belongs to the group of electronic music, visual arts and new technologies La Uca and performs audiovisual performances as part of the duo Söon i Noki.
Schedule:
Tuesday to Thursday from 11:30 am to 1:30 pm.
Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 11:00 to 14:00 and 17:00 to 20:00.
Monday closed.
Free admission.