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.
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Gabriel Orozco comments: “In the exhibition [Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002], I tried to connect with the photographs I took in Mali in July...
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Casa de la cabeza (2011) is a drawing of the words of the title, which translate literally into English as “house of the head.” Ortiz uses this humorous phrase to engage the idea of living in your head....
Justice (2014) presents viewers with a curious assemblage: a wooden gallows with slightly curved spindles protruding from the topmost plank, which in turn is covered with rudimentary netting, the threads slackly dangling like a loose spider’s web or an rib cage that’s been cracked open...
Charco 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)...
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