Los Mutantes
2012 - Installation (Installation)
170 frames, each 9.53H x 3.07W x 1.18D inches
Pedro Reyes
Pedro Reyes’s Los Mutantes ( Mutants , 2012) is composed of 170 plates that combine characters from ancient and modern mythologies. As in a periodic table, animals and objects are combined with humans (male or female), providing a rational framework for the irrational products of human imagination. A Cartesian matrix such as this must follow certain rules. All figures are half-human, half-something. Animal/cartoon characters that speak, such as Fritz the Cat or Donald Duck, are excluded, as well as oddities and chimeras without recognizable human features. Their arrangement results in combinations such as fish plus woman equals mermaid; bull plus man equals minotaur, and so on. The juxtapositions cross figures from pop culture with those from ancient myths, encouraging us to notice similarities between religious icons and comic-book characters. All of these “mutants” reveal something about our desire to extract qualities of animals or objects and empower ourselves with them. Mythologies are a reflection of the paradigms of their time, and this kind of periodic table presents a rational framework to categorize irrational products of the imagination.
Pedro Reyes’s works traverse the worlds of art, film, architecture, design, social criticism, and pedagogy. Educated as an architect, Reyes draws on this training to engage with utopian aspirations and the ongoing legacy of Modernism, often focusing on issues of scale and space while questioning pressing social issues through the incitement of individual or collective interaction. Although only a few of his works are directly located within the practice of building, almost all involve some kind of construction, whether they are objects, models, interiors, or social spaces. Reyes also makes use of strategies developed for communication or education, as well as everyday humor, to engage his audiences. Many of his works either allow large-scale public engagement or suggest a possible use: weapons turned to shovels, multilevel parks in old modernist buildings, and small spherical rooms. Like many avant-garde thinkers of the past, Reyes constructs new forms of architecture necessary for new ways of life.
Colors:
Related works of genres: » mexican contemporary artists
» see more
© » KADIST
Minerva Cuevas
2006During 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...
© » KADIST
Mario Garcia Torres
2005Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
© » KADIST
Abraham Cruzvillegas
2004Wright Imperial Hotel (2004) is a sort of bow and arrow made out of feathers, a São Paulo phone book, and other materials...
© » KADIST
Gabriel Orozco
1994Charco 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)...
Related works featuring themes of: » Social Action, » Mexico, » Violence, » Political, » Contemporary Conceptualism, » Sound Art, » Antiquity as Subject, » Chance, » Contemporary Diy, » Mexican
» see more
© » KADIST
Yoshua Okón
2009Canned 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...
© » KADIST
Abraham Cruzvillegas
2004Wright Imperial Hotel (2004) is a sort of bow and arrow made out of feathers, a São Paulo phone book, and other materials...
© » KADIST
Harrell Fletcher
2005The 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...
Other related works, blended automatically
» see more
© » KADIST
Yoshua Okón
2009Canned 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...
© » KADIST
Abraham Cruzvillegas
2004Wright Imperial Hotel (2004) is a sort of bow and arrow made out of feathers, a São Paulo phone book, and other materials...
© » KADIST
Jonathan Hernández
2008In line with Hernández’s interest in catastrophe, Vulnerabilia (choques) is a collection of images of shipwrecks and Vulnerabilia (naufragios) collects scenes of car crashes...
Related works sharing similar palette
» see more
Related works from the » 2010's created around » Mexico City, Mexico
» see more
© » KADIST
Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker
2012In Tapitapultas (2012), Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker comment on mass consumerism and pollution by way of a game they invented...
© » KADIST
Mario Garcia Torres
2010In 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...
© » KADIST
Julieta Aranda
2016The video Swimming in rivers of Glue is composed of various images of nature, exploring the themes of exploration of space and its colonization...
Other works by: » Pedro Reyes
» see more
© » KADIST
Pedro Reyes
2005In Reyes’s words, “We should be able to extract the technological nutrients before we excrete our waste...
Related artist(s) to: Pedro Reyes » Abraham Cruzvillegas, » Rirkrit Tiravanija, » Julieta Aranda, » San Francisco, » Cao Fei, » Hans Ulrich Obrist, » Harrell Fletcher, » Jimmie Durham, » Mario García Torres, » Mark Leckey
» see more
© » KADIST
Julieta Aranda
2016The video Swimming in rivers of Glue is composed of various images of nature, exploring the themes of exploration of space and its colonization...
© » KADIST
Mario Garcia Torres
2010In 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...
© » KADIST
Harrell Fletcher
2005The 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...
Related works found in the same semantic group
» see more
© » KADIST
Harm van den Dorpel
2021Mutant Garden Autobreeder by Harm van den Dorpel is a generative animated artwork based on evolutionary programming that never appears the same twice...
© » KADIST
Ana Vaz
2022Ana Vaz describes her film É Noite na América (It is Night in America) as an eco-terror tale, freely inspired by A cosmopolitics of animals by Brazilian philosopher Juliana Fausto; in which she investigates the political life of non-human beings and questions the modern idea of the exceptionality of the human species...
© » KADIST
Melvin Moti
2015Cluster Illusion examines the brain’s tendency to recognize a pattern as something abstract...