Camil has made numerous paintings and photographs of halted projects along Mexico’s highways (she calls them “highway follies”), and of abandoned billboards that look like theater curtains dramatizing failed capitalist strategies. (Espectacular, the colloquial Spanish term for “billboard,” also translates more literally as “spectacle,” and of course recalls Guy Debord’s famous 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle .) In Mexico, the urban landscape has been taken over by billboards; they are totally integrated into the landscape. With overuse and reuse, they get scrapped, reshuffled, and recycled. In Espectacular (cortina) ( Spectacular [Curtain] , 2012), Camil abstracts such billboards into a multicolored fabric curtain to probe the multiple meanings of espectacular. The curtain is intended to work not only as a three-dimensional painting, but also as a screen that obstructs or conceals another space, causing the viewer to wonder: if nothing is on the other side of the curtain, who is the audience and who are the actors?
Through her installations and performance-based work, Pia Camil demonstrates a keen interest in failure. She often explores urban ruins—decay associated with the Mexican urban landscape, and specifically traces of modernist culture and art history that have been left behind. By incorporating appropriation and performance methods, Camil enacts a critical questioning of previously identified discourses, deconstructing preestablished references in order to generate a sense of estrangement in which she can explore the political connotations of the use of space.
Fabiola Torres-Alzaga plays with magic, illusion, and sleight-of-hand, fabricating installations, drawings, and films that toy with our perceptions...
Pablo Rasgado’s paintings and installations serve as a visual record of contemporary urban human behavior...
Telescopic Pole is an adjustable telescopic pole that extends vertically from floor to ceiling and is held up by its own internal pressure...
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...
Fabiola Torres-Alzaga plays with magic, illusion, and sleight-of-hand, fabricating installations, drawings, and films that toy with our perceptions...
Pablo Rasgado’s paintings and installations serve as a visual record of contemporary urban human behavior...
Ben Shaffer’s Ben Deroy (2007) is part performance, part self-portrait, and part spiritual vision...
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...
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...
Since the global capital expansion, billboards have been the medium of communication between the rulers and the residents of townships...
For many years, Nina Könnemann has placed a camera before a billboard situated in the suburb Neukoln in Berlin...
NO POSITIONS AVAILABLE is composed of panels covering the entire wall of the gallery exemplifying one of the tendencies of the artist...
Halfway between a painting and an installation City Sound of Rug gathers found images, synthetic foam, painted metal plates, and prints placed on the floor...