Consuegra’s Colombia is a mirror made in the shape of the artist’s home country—a silhouette that has an important resonance for the artist. Consuegra’s mirrored Colombia is similar to an earlier version, made to be show opposite a mirror of the United States. Whether reflecting his two homes within one another (Consuegra studied in the US and has made several works about this experience of living in exile from his homeland), or simply reflecting its surroundings, Colombia is a simple yet evocative work about the identity of a nation, and the things that we project—really and metaphorically—onto its form. Nicolás Consuegra explores the contradictions of modern visual culture through his photographs, sculptures, paintings, and installations. Much of his work deals with subtle differences between one thing and another, whether they are visual differences or semiotic shifts. He creates visual games specifically intended to engage with Modernism’s crisply defined aesthetics. Consuegra’s shrewd alterations expose the superficiality of our shared understanding of the mid-twentieth century, calling into question our perception of reality and temporality.
Nicolás Consuegra (b. 1976, lives in Bogotá) explores the contradictions of modern visual culture through his photographs, sculptures, paintings, and installations. Much of his work deals with subtle differences between one thing and another, whether they are visual differences or semiotic shifts.
Foreigners Everywhere is a series of neon signs in several different languages...
In Gradation (2011), nine raspberries lined up on a lichen-dotted rock progress from left to right, dark to light, plump and juicy to not-yet-ripe...
Memorial for intersections #2 (2013) is a minimalist, black metallic structure that contains the brightly colored translucent circles, triangles, rectangles, and squares that originally were presented in Pica’s performance work A ? B ? C (2013)...
Lara uses things readily at hand to create objects and situations that interrogate the processes of art and the spectrum of roles that art and artists play in society...
Clarissa Tossin’s film Ch’u Mayaa responds to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (constructed 1919–21) in Los Angeles, an example of Mayan Revival architecture...
In Fordlândia Fieldwork (2012), Tossin documents the remains of Henry Ford’s rubber enterprise Fordlândia, built in 1928 in the Brazilian Amazon to export cultivated rubber for the booming automobile industry...
South Africa Righteous Space by Hank Willis Thomas is concerned with history and identity, with the way race and ‘blackness’ has not only been informed but deliberately shaped and constructed by various forces – first through colonialism and slavery, and more recently through mass media and advertising – and reminds us of the financial and economic stakes that have always been involved in representations of race....
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism...
Intentionally Left Blanc alludes to the technical process of its own (non)production; a procedure known as retro-reflective screen printing in which the image is only fully brought to life through its exposure to flash lighting...
Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...
Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...
Like many of his other sculptural works, the source of I am the Greatest is actually a historical photograph of an identical button pin from the 1960s...