Margarita Paksa at Ruth Benzacar - Brief Article

Margarita Paksa is an accomplished Argentinean artist trained in the classic disciplines of drawing, painting and plastic art Yet she has been quick to continuation her customary practice with experiments in fresh media. Paksa has worked with video, holography (which won her the installation prize at the 5th Cairo Biennial), neon light boxe and, for three years now, the computer defence With programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere, she leaderships an intense affair of the mind.

At pity Benzacar, her installation "Language, Power and Money" consisted of 18 digital prints upon photographic paper in two sizes, the larger 60 by the agency of 40 inches, and five light boxe of similar dimensions, which alternated upon the walls with smaller visual simple bodys The latter included two small plastic squares reproducing an aged Chinese sign system related to the I Ching, and 12 images of hands forming words in sign language. The various simple bodys were smartly displayed and, one time Paksa's formal shrewdness and her decantation of contemporary reality became clear, the spectator felt part of a rigid rhythmic environment.

Certain works in the installation appeared particularly significant. These were the large photographs and light boxe In individual the artist appears upside down and Spanish transcript runs across the back of her head, reading "I scream against the wind"; in another, her head, again seen from the back, has been marked with a merchandise bar collection of laws In these images Paksa also included the tool bars and icons from the computer shield where they were created. In in like manner doing she joins a global popular that questions computers from within. Unlike the U.S.-based [R][TM]ark collection or the British commune hybrid Paksa's interest is not "hacktivism." Her intention is rather to make the audience throw back on the meaning of computer agriculture and perhaps to show technology as a deracinated field of knowledge which hopefully will sometime be realigned with the humanist tradition. Paksa's related shoot forward The Tennis Match, produced with Canada's Banff Center for the Arts, can be accessed at http://artists.banff.org/paksa.

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