A Priori / A Posteriori, 2022

Every work in a priori / a posteriori has the same title, Lightness of Being, so the exhibition can be read as one work. The title refers both to the light the works reflect around the room and to the lightness Oriente wanted the room to have: transparent, close to weightless, without fixed edges.

The exhibition title borrows two terms from philosophy, for what can be known before experience and what can only be known through it. Oriente used them to ask how much of what we see we already bring with us, and how much depends on where we are standing.

The works are mirror installations and two UV-printed acrylic glass panels in wooden frames. Some hang from thin lines, while others are fixed to the wall or rest on the floor. They throw reflections and shadows across the room, fluid in some places and geometric in others. A small square mirror near the ceiling sends diamond-shaped patches of light onto the wall behind it. Because the mirrors also reflect the room and the people in it, the shadows change as visitors move through the space.

Oriente has said she wanted visitors to feel they were in “a large, endless space, not suffocating,” and that even an empty feeling is, perhaps, a valid emotion. It was her first solo exhibition, and the point where her work moved from experimenting with materials towards perception and space.