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...
Canned Laughter was Okón’s response to an invitation from Ciudad Juárez , Mexico, where artists were asked to create works based on their experience of the city...
Taking archaeology as her departure point to examine the trajectories of replicated and displaced objects, “Who will measure the space, who will tell me the time?” was produced in Oaxaca for her exhibition of the same title at the Contemporary Museum of Oaxaca (MACO) in 2015...
Masks is a series of abstract paintings by Simon Fujiwara that together form a giant, fragmented portrait of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s face...
Fridge-Freezer is a 2-channel video installation where Yoshua Okón explores the darker side of suburbia, d escribed by the artist as “ the ideal environment for a numb existence of passive consumerism and social a nd environmental disengagement...
Gabriel Kuri has created a series of works in which he juxtaposes perennial and ephemeral materials...
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...
Hand Palm Echo 1 is a digital animation based on Christine Sun Kim’s staircase mural at The Drawing Center in New York (10 March – 22 May, 2022)...
This untitled work from 2012 is a print originally made as part of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s artist limited edition series...
Telescopic Pole is an adjustable telescopic pole that extends vertically from floor to ceiling and is held up by its own internal pressure...
Wheat’s work is built on a strong conceptual framework that weaves together commentary on social and political issues and the radical potential for change...
This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...
LAB (2013) conjures the body as the trace of a sooty hand appears, spectrally, on a crumpled paper towel...
Converting is a piece about the Orang Laut, often called Sea Nomads, that inhabited the Riau archipelago...
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...