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...
Gabriel Orozco comments: “In the exhibition [Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002], I tried to connect with the photographs I took in Mali in July...
In Reyes’s words, “We should be able to extract the technological nutrients before we excrete our waste...
Reeder’s works often start with language—and his Pasta Paintings are no different...
Natasha Wheat’s Kerosene Triptych (2011) is composed of three images, one each from the digital files of the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Field Museum tropical research archive...
Concerned with the early history of Singapore, Zai Kuning spent many years living with and researching the history of the Riau peoples who were the first inhabitants of Singapore...
Masks is a series of abstract paintings by Simon Fujiwara that together form a giant, fragmented portrait of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s face...
Federico Herrero’s energetic paintings reflect his experiences on the streets of his native San José, Costa Rica, and in the surrounding tropical landscape...
This untitled work from 2012 is a print originally made as part of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s artist limited edition series...
While his works can function as abstract, they are very much rooted in physicality and the possibilities that are inherent in the materials themselves...
Ben Shaffer’s Ben Deroy (2007) is part performance, part self-portrait, and part spiritual vision...
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...
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...