During her research on primitive currencies and cultural cannibalism, Cuevas came across the Donald Duck comic book issue “The Stone Money Mystery,” where Donald goes on a quest to find missing museum objects. Cuevas’s America (2006) is a wall painting of a comic Donald Duck wallowing in a heap of gold coins, alluding to Mexico’s postrevolutionary mural tradition. The mural’s background is one of the earliest illustrations of flora and fauna in the American continent, juxtaposed with a reference to America as having bountiful natural resources available to be exploited, and the historical use of comics as ideological tools. The piece also recalls the politics of the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco filtered through contemporary narratives of identity, otherness, and power. Driven first by multiculturalism in the United States, then by globalization worldwide, this Disney reference also refers to the notorious book How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic , originally published during the Chilean revolution as Para Leer al Pato Donald before it was banned and burned. Writing from exile in 1975, the authors signed the preface to the English edition as follows: “Mr. Disney, we are returning your Duck. Feathers plucked and well-roasted. Look inside, you can see the handwriting on the wall, our hands still writing on the wall: Donald, Go Home!”
Minerva Cuevas’s socially engaged practice encompasses a range of strategies and mediums, including film, installation, performance, and site-specific public intervention. Cuevas aims to provide insight into the complex economic and political structures of the social realm, offering playful possibilities for their subversion. Often manifesting as small but poignant interruptions into the everyday realm, Cuevas’s modest acts infiltrate and disrupt economic and social systems, drawing attention to the aesthetics of popular imagery such as corporate branding, political symbols and slogans, and even comic books.
Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...
In his posters, prints, and installations, Erick Beltrán employs the language and tools of graphic design, linguistics, typography, and variations in alphabetical forms across cultures; he is specifically interested in how language and meaning form structures that can be misconstrued as universal...
Pablo Rasgado’s paintings and installations serve as a visual record of contemporary urban human behavior...
Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive...
In his posters, prints, and installations, Erick Beltrán employs the language and tools of graphic design, linguistics, typography, and variations in alphabetical forms across cultures; he is specifically interested in how language and meaning form structures that can be misconstrued as universal...
Pablo Rasgado’s paintings and installations serve as a visual record of contemporary urban human behavior...
The video Interrupted Passage presents a performance Morales staged in the former home of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, a mid-nineteenth-century Mexican general serving in California...
Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive...
Pierre Leguillon features: “Diane Arbus: A Printed Retrospective, 1960-1971” December 6, 2008 – February 7, 2009 This first retrospective of the works of Diane Arbus (1923-1971) ever organized in France, brings together all the images commissioned to the New York photographer by the Anglo-Saxon press in the 1960s...
The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...
Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...
This series of small drawings is executed with varying materials—pen, ink, colored pencil, charcoal, and masking tape—on architect’s tracing paper...
In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text...
This series of small drawings is executed with varying materials—pen, ink, colored pencil, charcoal, and masking tape—on architect’s tracing paper...
Donald of Doom Tank (2008) is a replica of a vintage metal toy with Donald Duck’s image one side and a soldier on the other...
Pedro Reyes’s Los Mutantes ( Mutants , 2012) is composed of 170 plates that combine characters from ancient and modern mythologies...