Film & Video (Film & Video)

“A man wanders near the windows of a gallery, situated adjacent to the street. He occasionally gazes through windows into the gallery but never enters.” Passersby are numerous since these windows are by a tram stop on a busy street. It is surprising to note how few of them take any notice of this man peering repeatedly through the slightly tinted glass into an empty meeting room with no distinctive signs to be seen.

Photography (Photography)

Ana Roldán’s Primeval forms series looks up close at the fecund shapes of plants often found in the artist’s native Mexico. These botanical portraits, like this one of the Pseudobombax ellipticum, or shaving brush tree, bristle against the edges of the image’s frame, fecund and wild, familiar yet foreign. Ana Roldán works in diverse media such as performance, sculpture, installations, video and collage.

Photography (Photography)

Ana Roldán’s Displacements works use images taken from a 1970s exhibition catalogue for an exhibition called The Death in Mexico. Using pre-Columbian objects and other artifacts from Mexican history, the exhibition aimed to explore various representations of death in the Mexican cultural tradition. Roldán’s works begin with these rich black-and-white photographs and break them apart into fragments, slicing and dismembering the artifacts they depict.