Time Capsule is a solo-show of works by London-based Spanish artist Isabel Sierra y Gómez de León, organised in collaboration with and curated by Spanish Contemporary Art Network (SCAN). With a background in advertising and media, Sierra creates work that deals with the relationship between language, visual representation and populist imagination. Her artistic practice during recent years has centred on contemporary mythology, undermining the impact of the rapidly evolving technology on the individual’s approach to earlier seemingly sacred phenomena, such as mortality and identity. The subjects of her photographs – mostly still lives – turn into metaphors for conditions that we have created but ultimately are under the control of. In the face of their acute relevance to the twenty-first century, Sierra’s work is greatly influenced by Spanish and Dutch Baroque, distinguished by its use of mundane objects in politically satirical paintings. And were it not for their glossy surfaces,...her pictures could very well be the work of a seventeenth-century master. Compositionally and content-wise the digital prints appear neutral, by all means decorative, but subjected to the imagination of the viewer meanings start to take form. Calico, a still life of two vases with a cut flower in each, set against a pitch black background, is titled after Calico Lab, a Google-funded research company using advanced technology to improve our understanding of the biological lifespan. The two cut flowers, one dying and one sprouting, suggest the implications on nature, in the form of artificial life, inflicted by technology. Also from Time Capsule, CLOVD II is a direct reference to Google Cloud, a platform for storing and sharing personal information. Here, a glossy red apple under a glass cupola on a shelf, presented in sharp contrast to a collection of organic, root vegetables seen below, functions as a metaphor for the immortal and perfected identities we create in the digital world.
