In Ante la imagen (Before the Image, 2009) Muñoz continues to explore the power of a photograph to live up to the memory of a specific person. Since a photograph is fixed, it cannot encapsulate the spirit of someone who is gone. Muñoz etched onto the surface of a mirror an appropriated historical image, a daguerreotype from 1839. The viewer sees themselves as well as the subject, the chemist Robert Cornelius. The image is always changing, decaying, in a metaphor for life.
Óscar Muñoz is regarded as one of Colombia’s most important artists, recognized for creating an outstanding body of work over the past three decades in a country troubled by civil war and drug-related violence. He is also the cofounder of Lugar a Dudas (Room for Doubt), a vital art space for activating critical thinking and providing cultural exchange in Cali, Colombia. He is not formally trained in photography, but likes the medium for its capacity to illustrate the transformations of unstable materials such as charcoal, sugar, coffee, and breath. Muñoz is concerned with presence and absence, forgetting and remembering, and acts of engraving and impression. The physicality of the impression is a metaphor for the moment when a memory becomes fixed in the mind. Produced in the context of Colombia, in a culture of disappearance, his work is a profound metaphor for the human experience of life and death.
Nicolas Paris studied architecture and worked as an elementary school teacher before he decided to become an artist...
Primero estaba el mar ( First Was the Sea , 2012) is a system of equivalences between syllables and silhouettes of waveforms cast in cement...
The small drawings that comprise Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists are based on photographs taken at a political rally in downtown Los Angeles in which thousands of individuals demonstrated for immigrants’ rights...
The first iteration of Flutter was specifically conceived for the Pro Arts Gallery space in Oakland in 2010, viewable from the public space of a sidewalk, and the version acquired by the Kadist Collection is an adaptation of it...
Bowers’ Radical Hospitality (2015) is a sculptural contradiction: its red and blue neon letters proclaim the words of the title, signaling openness and generosity, while the barbed wires that encircle the words give another message entirely...
The primary interest in the trilogy is Joskowicz’s use of cinematic space, with long tracking shots that portray resistance to habitual viewing experiences of film and television...
Juego de Banderas (a play on words that loosely translates to both set of flags and game of flags) is a triptych of modified Colombian flags by Antonio Caro...
A residency program in the blazing hot city of Honda, Colombia, inspired artist Nicolás Consuegra to consider the difficulty in understanding the needs of a distant community...
The primary interest in the trilogy is Joskowicz’s use of cinematic space, with long tracking shots that portray resistance to habitual viewing experiences of film and television...
Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
Defined as entropy, the second law of thermodynamics proposes that energy is more easily dispersed than it is concentrated...
Calle’s drawings all inhabit received forms but alter them to call attention to specific qualities...
Destilaciones ( Distillations , 2014) is an installation composed of a group of ceramic pots, presented on the floor and within a steel structure...
The American War , which takes its title from the Vietnamese term for what Americans call the Vietnam War, has toured the United States extensively with the goal of presenting a Vietnamese perspective of that history...
After engaging primarily with video and photography for more than a decade, Chen turned to painting to explore the issue of urban change and memories—both personal and collective...
Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
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...