Mana Digital Open House
Contemporary and Digital Art Fair CADAF 2020
June 25-28, 2020

It’s all I have to bring today—
This, and my heart beside—
This, and my heart, and all the fields—
And all the meadows wide—
Be sure you count—should I forget
Some one the sum could tell—
This, and my heart, and all the bees
Which in the clover dwells.

Emily Dickinson

I miss nature.

Grasses is a mix-media installation that creates a dialogue between two fictional forms of nature. The collages hanging on the walls and filling the ambiance as plants would do, establishes a contrasting relationship between my work on paper and the images on the digital screens in front of them, conveying the feeling of freedom that usually comes from being in an open field.

The experience that comes from being in contact with nature has fed many of my works throughout the years. During the quarantine, not being able to wander outdoors, I started to substitute at home these encounters with real nature taking pictures of those virtual landscapes from television series, documentaries, photographs and movies, the same way I capture moments in my travels to treasure the memories of those places and lived experiences. I also created evocative collages after those images of meadows and fields in different color palettes according to each climatic region.

Usually set as backgrounds, these hills covered in grasses exist in real places far from where I live. Some of the still images from those vast landscapes included a closed caption at the moment of taking the picture, which enhanced the ephemeral sensation of actually being there. Then there are also fictional universes with sublime landscapes like the ones in Westworld, where the main character chooses “to see the beauty” in the world –just as I do– instead of the disarray.

Patricia Van Dalen, June 2020