Photography (Photography)

Behind the simplicity and beauty of this untitled photograph of a brilliantly-colored flowerbed by Félix González-Torres are two remarkable stories of love, loss, and resilience. As with most of his works, the photograph is untitled followed by a parenthesis that provides some context clues. In this case, an inscription on the reverse of the photograph reads: For Laura (Alice B. Toklas + Gertrude Stein Flower Bed in Paris).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Summer Camp , Lola Gonzàlez filmed a group of friends at the home of her parents in the department of Charente (France) in the process of transforming the house into a training camp. They are doing exercises with the furniture as if they were training to fight against something yet to happen. Gonzàlez ’s films persistently evoke the same fear of an external threat, one which is never explained but which can be placed in relation with the current political situation and social tension.

Installation (Installation)

Ambiguous Gestures takes as its point of origin a film Gmelin discovered in his father’s archive. Filmed from a fixed point, it portrays his father in an intimate performance of body painting with a woman unknown to Felix Gmelin. The discovery of this footage was obviously disturbing.

Painting (Painting)

In Untitled (after Paul Schultze Nuremberg’s Kunst) (2006), from a larger series of diptychs, Gmelin addresses the notion of entartete kunst ( “Degenerate Art”) . Each diptych juxtaposes a portrait of a person considered to be mentally handicapped with a painting that was branded by the Nazi regime as degenerate. Gmelin’s source for these images is Kunst und Rasse (“Art and Race”), a book by Paul Schultze Naumburg published in 1928.

Installation (Installation)

Easy to fold and carry, Jorge González’s Banquetas Chéveres (Chéveres Stools) embody the nomadic and flexible nature of the Escuela de Oficios. González’s work employs a modernist language while paying homage to artisanal techniques specific to Puerto Rico and the Indigenous knowledge, people, and histories of the Carribean. Reinterpreting the furniture line ArKlu (1945-1948) conceived by the architects Stephen Arneson and Henry Klumb, the stools were conceived in collaboration with various artisans in Puerto Rico–Eustaquio Alers, a weaver from Aguadilla, Joe Hernández from Ciales, and MAOF from San Juan, a contemporary wood-salvaging collective, among others.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In his Conceito abstrato series, however, Rodrigo Torres turns to the abstract, using the shapes, numbers, lines, and subtle colors of international currencies to create non-representational forms with lavish geometries and baroque curving forms.

Photography (Photography)

In 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. The long-exposure capture depicts García Torres at multiple stages of brainstorming, devising, and introspection, his ethereal figure connected with artistic giants of the past. Yet, there is also an insipid tone beyond mere insomnia or frustration at the lack of being able to garner inspiration.

Installation (Installation)

Jardín (2013) refers to environmental destruction, specifically the preponderance of disposable plastics, as well as Medellín’s long history of dangerous conflict; it was once considered the most violent city in the world because of the drug trafficking there. This floor sculpture consists of shoes made of river stones, strung with flip-flop straps. Here, Chavajay plays the natural (found stones) against the synthetic (plastic), heavy against light, hard against soft, revealing the irony of their fusion and the impossibility of their alleged function as shoes.

Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films. Indeed rather surprisingly Kim seems to have had a huge collection of Western videos and he published a book called “On the art of the Cinema” in 1973. As the final acknowledgments indicate, Garcia Torres’s work was produced following in depth research, consulting information given by director Shin Sang-ok who has been kidnapped by Kim in 1978, as well as Jerrold Post (The George Washington University) and Timothy Savage (Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development).

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art. For him, this is a way of rethinking the tradition in a more personal way, to have a grip on events of recent history and examine them with a curiosity, both critical and sensual. The artist emphasizes the fact that new ideas and meanings may arise from these archaeological narratives.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Fabiola Torres-Alzaga plays with magic, illusion, and sleight-of-hand, fabricating installations, drawings, and films that toy with our perceptions. Her interests and the resulting aesthetic projects seem couched in the 19thcentury sideshow, more than the contemporary art world. In her delicate drawings, Adaptando la Carta, layers of tracing paper reveal different hand positions, concealing and revealing a playing card hidden among the curves of the magician’s hand.

September 2007

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Mario Garcia Torres discovered the work of artist Oscar Neuestern in an article published in ARTnews in 1969. This article, which is the only trace of his work, is indicative of a lack of interest by Neuestern to leave his name in history; to “defend an artistic activity that has little or no interest to last.” Oscar Neuestern could only remember the previous 24 hours, of which his life and his work are in constant erasure and reconstruction. His practice was “to let things be done with time and the unconscious,” while “not fearing the void.” He looked for the absolute through transparency and symmetry.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Untitled was part of the 2002 exhibition “Drawings for the Austrian School” held at the D’Amelio Terras gallery in New York. For this occasion, Morris created a language of his own by using acrylic, ink, graphite and ballpoint pen on paper. The exhibition title comes from Morris’ interest in the early 20th century Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, a one time Austrian Minister of Finance, bank director, and economics professor who taught in Europe and at Harvard University.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Manuel Correa’s short film Didn’t Know I Died is a testimonial portrait of the acclaimed Colombian poet Olga Elena Mattei. Earlier in her life during a simple medical operation, Mattei was declared medically dead. In the film, she recounts her first memory upon waking up, a dream.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Manuel Correa’s documentary Four Hundred Unquiet Graves is a powerful and vulnerable visual essay about the descendants of those who were disappeared during the Spanish Civil War from 1936–1939. The film reveals the spectrum of violence that surrounds the war, namely the impact of thousands of forced disappearances on different generations. Surviving family members are haunted not only by the absence of their grandparents, but also by the overwhelming grief that lives in their parents.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

La Forma del Presente (The Shape of Now) by Manuel Correa follows a group of survivors of Colombia’s 50-year long armed conflict facing the impossible task of agreeing on a shared past. After half a century of carnage, Colombia achieved peace. Despite an agreement between the government and the Revolutionary armed forces of Colombia (FARC_EP) being rejected by popular vote, the government chose to implement the agreements regardless, further polarizing the public opinion.

Installation (Installation)

This is not in Spanish looks at the ways in which the Chinese population in Mexico navigates the daily marginalization they encounter there. The neon translates as “this is not in Spanish,” making reference to both the famous Rene Magritte painting “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” as well as signs posted in the windows of Chinese establishments in Mexico.

Installation (Installation)

Relying on repetition and repurposed materials, Soares works to interrogate time—its measurement, its passing, and its meaning. With copper wire stretched out across the room like a clothesline, Valeska Soares’ La Ligne du Temps creates a timeline out of fluttering, old book pages. Read upon the pages of this delicately wrought installation are linguistic approaches to time and its phenomonologies.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Nuevo Dragon City is a reenactment of a historical event from 1927 in which six Chinese were either trapped or voluntarily hid themselves inside a building in northern Mexico. Working with this unsettled mystery, De La Torre’s video inquires into the historical and continuing tensions between Chinese and Mexicans. As such, Nuevo Dragon City depicts a symbolic act of self-entrapment in which six untrained actors of Chinese descent silently blockade themselves inside in an empty Tijuana storefront.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The graphite drawing 4 mourners on a mantel by Gala Porras-Kim is part of a larger installation and body of research, entitled An Index and Its Settings (Un Índice y Sus Entornos) , in which the artist reconsiders 235 ancient burial figures (from circa 200 BCE – 50 CE) from what is now Mexico’s Pacific coast that are part of the Proctor Stafford Collection held by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Eschewing their current musicological function, 4 mourners on a mantel presents photo-realistic depictions of said figures on top of a hypothetical collector’s fireplace. Herein, these funerary objects are displaced as curios which stare back at the viewer in signs of grief and confusion.