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.
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...
In Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark My Creativity Mario García Torres constructs and documents a hypothetical scene, situating himself within a lineage of artists and creatives that used to congregate at the historic hotel...
This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...
Julio Cesar Morales’s watercolor drawings, Undocumented Intervention , show a variety of surprising hiding places assumed by people trying to cross into the United States without documentation...
Mario Garcia Torres discovered the work of artist Oscar Neuestern in an article published in ARTnews in 1969...
Charco portátil congelado (Frozen Portable Puddle, 1994) is a photographic record of an installation of the same name that Gabriel Orozco made at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam for the group exhibition WATT (1994)...
Pedro Reyes’s Los Mutantes ( Mutants , 2012) is composed of 170 plates that combine characters from ancient and modern mythologies...
Fabiola Torres-Alzaga plays with magic, illusion, and sleight-of-hand, fabricating installations, drawings, and films that toy with our perceptions...
Contrabando is a work that references the larger sociological phenomenon in which immigrant economic strategies come to infiltrate urban landscapes...
In Reyes’s words, “We should be able to extract the technological nutrients before we excrete our waste...
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...
Wright Imperial Hotel (2004) is a sort of bow and arrow made out of feathers, a São Paulo phone book, and other materials...
Gabriel Orozco often documents found situations in the natural or urban landscape...
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...