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The Vale of Avernus

2015

digital print on metallic paper with kirigami, 99 x 33"

exhibition view: Cremated Names at AVALANCHE! ICA, Calgary, 2015
Curated by Cassandra Paul & Nate McLeod

“‘Foundling rocks, stars, black and full of language: named after an oath silenced to pieces.’
— Paul Celan

The absence of a name is a deeper kind of dark. What abiding structures underlie the things we’ve previously understood only by naming them? In AVALANCHE’s exhibition Cremated Names, Miruna Dragan excavates the hollows of analytical comprehension, articulating images that are at once vacuous and flooded with significance. The identifiably human dimensions of a grave define the rectilinear plane Dragan has chosen as the surface upon which she develops her complex imagery, an artistic choice so indirect as to be latently poignant. To descend the stairs represented by the artist’s finely-cut kirigami, is to pursue an orphic journey, fingers grasping blindly along the numinous edge. Currents of meaning course below their ghost-like signifiers... it is this chthonic glimmer for which Dragan mines.” — Jenna Swift (writer & artist)

Excerpt from IN DISCUSSION / Miruna Dragan & Jenna Swift at AVALANCHE! ICA, November 2015,
with contributions by Nicole Kelly Westman, Ashley Bedet, and Sasha Foster:

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