Partial Record

In Partial Record, Gela Mikava builds, obscures and partially removes images on reclaimed biazi, a cotton fabric formerly stretched across domestic ceilings beneath glue and paper. Existing stains, adhesive and remnants affect how paint enters the fabric and how subsequent layers adhere.

Mikava paints, washes, attaches paper and covers marks. In a recurring action, he staples a drawn sheet across the surface and pulls it away, leaving fragments caught beneath the metal fastenings. The same points that secure the sheet become sites of tearing and partial retention.

The remaining material offers clues to an image that is no longer available as a whole. Lettering, drawn lines and torn edges invite reconstruction, while overpainting and changes in orientation interrupt reading. The works ask what a trace allows us to know, and when an attempt to recover an image begins to depend on conjecture.

Mikava’s attention to ambiguous marks began in childhood, when he searched rainwater stains on a biazi-and-paper ceiling for shapes. Here, that act of recognition becomes a task offered to the viewer. Traces inherited with the fabric meet those produced in the studio, and each intervention changes how earlier marks can be seen.