The Shore Collection
Level 2

This series offers CAC visitors a new way to experience contemporary art–through the eyes of local collectors.Selections from Cincinnati illustrates the diverse array of people in this community who collect, and the role contemporary art plays in their lives.

During this rotation, we present a sampling from The Shore Collection. This vignette features the work of two contemporary Spanish artists: Elena del Rivero and Mar Arza. Both artists transform the medium of paper into allegories for humanity. In doing so, each piece takes on an individual character.

Elena del Rivero was born in Valencia and has been based in New York since 1991. She is known for altering paper through a wide range of processes such as drawing, tearing, staining, weaving, and embroidery. The two pieces shown here depict how her alterations can create deep human meaning. Herida (Wound), transforms the paper into human flesh by clearly displaying the stitches of a closed injury. Letter from the Bride transforms pearls and collaged paper into a coded language.

Mar Arza, born in Barcelona, uses books as her medium. In the two works Del instante en los ojos nada (From the instant in the eyes nothing) and Tempos (Tempos), Arza cuts words out of the pages in order to manipulate the text and then lights the books from within, highlighting the missing words. The book in Encinta (Pregnant) is wrapped by ribbons of text that create shadows on its surface. The title of the piece is a play on the words enceinte, which means pregnant, and cinta, the Spanish word for ribbon. The wrapped text simultaneously evokes a womb and a cage. Nada era la herida (Nothing was the wound), a single piece composed of two frames, displays a page of a book in one frame with phrases cut out by the artist. The companion frame displays the surface that the artist cut against in order to alter the page of the book. Arza's process evokes either a sense of silence, or the violence of censorship and interruption that took place in removing the pieces of the text.

Fine Arts Fund Corporate Partner: Fifth Third Bank