NAM – Not A Museum presents the first of the exhibition projects scheduled from April to November in the temporarily reclaimed spaces of Manifattura Tabacchi. The program is made up of theme based exhibitions dedicated to the languages of contemporary art which have curators and artists as their protagonists. Its objective is to help overcome traditional exhibition boundaries and address non-places as fertile spaces of cultural dissemination. Within this context, NAM presents “The Vernal Age of Miry Mirrors”, Solo Exhibition by Michele Gabriele, curated by Treti Galaxie.

The exhibition curated by Treti Galaxie, a nomadic project founded by Matteo Mottin and Ramona Ponzini, features a series of sculptures titled ‘I’m sitting here on the ground so I’ll remember it as a nice atmosphere’ or ‘The difficulties of a form to move away from the stereotypes it evokes’, creating a dialogue with new videos by the artist.
The films are inspired by the way in which the nucleus of the cinematic and narrative message is expressed through sceneries, showing geometric landscapes and segments of places that are evoked on a dreamlike level – halfway between a filmic memory and a prophetic dream.

The sculptures are made out of silicon, epoxy resin, every-day use objects and electronic components. The structure of the works are inspired by the postures that many people, among which young artists, adopt when wanting to feign nonchalance: how they crouch, how they lean, the way in which they hold handbags and cigarettes while seemingly looking for something or someone.

These artworks originate from the will to investigate the modality of human observation, and stem from a research that is, in part, inspired by the variety of reactions and changes that have recently flooded society on a global level. In The Vernal Age of Miry Mirrors, the artist adopts abstraction and figuration as tools to trigger and, at the same time, confuse the mental mechanisms that emerge in spectators who find themselves experiencing an unforeseen event.
In fact, according to Michele Gabriele, these are the situations in which the brain tends to decode new elements as something already known.
More specifically, the mind adopts two strategies when put before unprecedented or unknown shapes, objects or situations: in the first it singles out a detail, even a minute one, which can be traced back to a familiar element, using it as a point of interest and resulting in a reconstruction of an entirely subjective image; in the second the brain simply prevents us from seeing the new element, identifying it as an error of perception.

Friday 29th April, 6.30pm at Giardino della Ciminiera, Treti Galaxie (Matteo Mottin and Ramona Ponzini), Michele Gabriele and Nicolò Porcelluzzi, editors of Il Tascabile and co-author of MEDUSA Newsletter will hold an open round table discussion on the exhibition.

Free entry.
You can book a place here.