Escaping Lines: Off-Screen and Freeze Frames — The Art Exhibition of Jacoba Ignacio
A Reflection on Borders, Moments, and Imagination
The art world buzzes with anticipation when a new exhibition by Jacoba Ignacio is announced. Renowned for her evocative explorations of space, memory, and transformation, Ignacio has made an indelible mark on contemporary art landscapes both in her native Paris and abroad. We are proud to bring her work to BAM. On her latest exhibition, entitled Escaping Lines: off-screen and freeze frames, gathers a dynamic assemblage of works that traverse mediums and continents, inviting viewers into liminal territories between perception and possibility.
Ignacio’s practice is rooted in the investigation of boundaries—those visible and invisible, fixed and fluid. The very title of the exhibition gestures toward her artistic preoccupation with the edges of things: lines that both separate and connect, moments that slip off the screen or pause in the hush of a freeze frame. The exhibition is more than a static display; it’s a journey, unfolding in space as well as in time.
Between Paris and Buffalo, this exhibition unfolds like a journey. Drawings, collages, adhesive tape, and video shape territories that invite visitors to linger in the moment or imagine new connections.
Ignacio’s selection of materials is both eclectic and deliberate. Her drawings—often rendered in graphite or ink—pulse with energy, the lines sometimes coiling into dense knots, other times stretching languidly across expanses of paper. Collages layer textures, colors, and found objects, weaving together fragments of city maps, postcards, and personal ephemera into new visual languages. Adhesive tape, a signature element in her recent work, becomes both boundary and bridge: it marks divisions on the gallery walls, yet simultaneously suggests the permeability of borders.
Video, the medium most closely associated with the concept of “freeze frames,” anchors the exhibition with moments of suspended animation. Ignacio’s moving images rarely offer narrative closure; rather, they capture and prolong the flicker of transition—a gesture caught mid-air, a glance that lingers just a beat too long. The interplay of stillness and movement proposes an alternative way of inhabiting time, where viewers are invited to dwell inside the pause.
Staged within BAM walls that echoe the architectural rhythms of Paris and the expansiveness of Buffalo, the exhibition presents itself as a narrative in fragments. Visitors are encouraged to trace their own paths through the space, crossing from intimate alcoves dominated by delicate sketches to immersive installations where video projections bleed onto adhesive tape grids. Each territory invites a different mode of engagement: contemplation, interaction, or imaginative leap.
Ignacio’s installation in the central gallery corridor, for instance, draws the visitor into a labyrinth of lines—some marked on the floor, others floating on translucent sheets suspended from the ceiling. The effect is disorienting yet liberating. The boundaries are there, but they are porous, mutable. As viewers navigate the maze, their movements become part of the artwork’s unfolding narrative.
The exhibition’s subtitle, “Between Paris and Buffalo,” is more than geographic orientation; it’s a meditation on duality and exchange. Paris, Ignacio’s artistic home, is evoked through elements of urban density, the subtle interplay of light and shadow, and references to historical avant-garde movements. Buffalo, a city known for its industrial heritage and proximity to natural wonders, brings a sense of openness, flux, and transformation.
Ignacio herself describes the act of crossing borders—literal and figurative—as essential to her creative process. In her artist’s statement, she recounts how the railways of Paris and the wide streets of Buffalo shaped her sense of movement, perspective, and possibility. The works assembled in Escaping Lines reflect these influences, staging encounters between metropolis and wilderness, constraint and release.
Central to the exhibition is the idea of time—not merely as chronology, but as experience. The “off-screen” moments are those that escape the boundaries of the frame, the unrecorded gestures and spontaneous connections that give life its texture. In contrast, the “freeze frames” are moments of arrested motion, windows into the liminal present that Ignacio renders visible and palpable.
Ignacio’s interest in boundaries is never purely formal. Her works touch upon pressing social themes: migration, belonging, and negotiation of space. The adhesive tape used in her installations recalls the demarcations of property and territory, of exclusion and welcome. Through her collages, she invokes stories of movement and displacement, layering archival images with contemporary interventions to suggest the ongoing dialogue between past and present.
The exhibition is also an invitation to linger—to resist the rush of the everyday and instead sink into moments of suspended possibility. In doing so, Ignacio proposes art as a space for reflection, empathy, and transformation, where new connections can be imagined and old borders can dissolve.
Escaping Lines: off-screen and freeze frames is a testament to Jacoba Ignacio’s mastery of form and concept. It is an exhibition that traverses borders—geographic, material, and temporal—to create a space of possibility. Through drawings, collages, adhesive tape, and video, Ignacio invites us to linger, to imagine, and to reconfigure our relationship to the world and to time itself. Between Paris and Buffalo, in the lines that escape and the frames that freeze, we find not only art, but also the promise of new beginnings.
