Piedras Blancas

2014 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

4:53 minutes

Miguel Angel Ríos

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For Piedras Blancas , arguably his most ambitious and visually arresting video to date, Miguel Angel Ríos made 3,000 “piedras” out of a concrete/stone composite. The video is shot in arid, mountainous locations in Mexico (his adopted country) and Argentina (his home country). Over several months, Ríos scouted locations for natural-worn tributaries where he eventually allowed these balls to then thunder down the mountain. The work is violent and humorous at once, absurd and impossible (a signature style of the artist). These “piedras” take on an anthropomorphic quality, as if they were people migrating in mass, akin to a wildebeest crossing in the Masai mara. They also provide a metaphor for drugs running through one’s veins. The work has been on view at Arizona State University Museum, Gallery Wendi Norris, EXPO Chicago’s Black Box Program curated by the Centre Pompidou’s Florence Derieux, at the Palais de Tokyo and in the Daros Latin America Collection.

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Miguel Angel Ríos studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires before moving to New York in the 1970’s to escape the military dictatorship in Argentina. He subsequently relocated to Mexico and now divides his time between New York and Mexico City. In his work, Ríos pairs a rigorous conceptual approach with a meticulously constructed, handmade aesthetic. Since the 1970’s, he has made work about the concept of the Latin American, using this idea as both an artistic strategy and a political problem. Over the past two decades, Ríos has delved into the medium of video to create symbolic narratives about human experience, violence, and mortality. His videos of spinning tops–trompos–use the childhood game as a backdrop for a meditation on the transience of life, and the mechanics of power.

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Colors:

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• symbolism.n.01
• transience.n.01
• migration.n.01
• motion.n.03
• batch.n.02
• border.v.05