July 1 - September 27, 2009 /

Sabatini Building, Floor 4 and Ópera Subway Station, Madrid

Exhibition view. Matthew Buckingham. Time Proxies, 2009 — Exhibition view. *Matthew Buckingham. Time Proxies*, 2009

Representantes del tiempo (Time Proxies) is Matthew Buckingham's (Nevada, USA, 1963) first individual exhibition in Spain. The exhibit of the multi-talented artist, displaying photography, video, audio, drawing and sculpture in different installation formats, is made up of a selection of works that identify and call into question the diverse processes of memory and the contrast between recollection and reality.

Buckingham's discourse centres on the ambiguities in time through the generation of psychological time or via narrations that give an understanding of the past through biographies. The exhibition, organised by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, also includes the work Detour (2009), displayed at the Opera station in the Madrid underground, and follows an aesthetic route that highlights the intinteraction between mediums: photo installation, video and 16mm films, all of which intermingle with chairs and sofas to use as well as posters and stationery that visitors can take away; thus, there is an aesthetic of work-process.

Buckingham produces formal work that turns the installation into a place of transit, a place that casts doubt on traditional notions of history by fragmenting and repositioning it; doubts about globalised narrations of colonialism, the duality of culture/nature and the accounts of monuments and inventions (the cinematographic image) as spaces that play with illusion and desire, altering in his installations the powers of this discourse in visual surroundings. Therefore, the relationship established between text, image and support is paramount as the exhibition is constructed with scenarios and sounds that invade, or are concealed, and where technical elements are presented as sculptures the moment the visitor passes through and is affected by them.

In his work Buckingham invites viewers to reconsider basic and universal notions, particularly those connected through the experience of time, the construction of the present and the recollections of the past. He offers considerations on the ways to record and approach time, along with the limits of perception related to the speed of light that counterpose the slow passing of geological time. Furthermore, he calls into question the traditional notion of global history, pointing to the impossibility of creating one history alone that is actually composed of local and subjective narratives, whilst also seeing time as a cognitive construction mediating between our relationships with others and our own surroundings.