Meditation Piece

This piece by Irene Kopelman is based on a Kaprow work of the same name, Meditation Pieces (1981). It was made for the exhibition A Fantasy for Allan Kaprow, held at Cairo’s Contemporary Image Collective CIC in 2009. Meditation Piece (2009) is part of this specific project, in which Kopelman travelled through Egypt’s White Desert, in the manner of a 19^th-century scientific expedition. The artist chooses a stone from that landscape and after returning to her studio in Amsterdam, draws it from the same angle each day over the course of one month. The thirty meticulous drawings resulting from this process, in which the working conditions, light and position in the studio are exactly the same each day, reveal differences, demonstrating the contradictions of perception. This piece also reflects central aspects of Kopelman’s artistic production: concentration on a figure from nature as an act of meditation, repetition as part of the process of investigation, and the fragility and subjectivity of awareness itself, which questions the objectivity of the image. This process makes clear the complexity of vision and the knowledge of things. At the same time, the disassociation of the representation of this single angle of the stone over a sequence of time leads to a study of the forms inherent in the work of the artist. The result presents the viewer with unexpected associations, in which the difference between each interpretation reveals the essence of what is being represented.