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...
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...
Converting is a piece about the Orang Laut, often called Sea Nomads, that inhabited the Riau archipelago...
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...
In Reyes’s words, “We should be able to extract the technological nutrients before we excrete our waste...
Gabriel Orozco often documents found situations in the natural or urban landscape...
Canned Laughter was Okón’s response to an invitation from Ciudad Juárez , Mexico, where artists were asked to create works based on their experience of the city...
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)...
Wright Imperial Hotel (2004) is a sort of bow and arrow made out of feathers, a São Paulo phone book, and other materials...
This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...
During her research on primitive currencies and cultural cannibalism, Cuevas came across the Donald Duck comic book issue “The Stone Money Mystery,” where Donald goes on a quest to find missing museum objects...
Itch explores the relationship between technology and daily human experience with a motorized arm that extends from within the gallery’s wall, moving up and down while holding a projector that shows a desperately scratching pair of hands....
LAB (2013) conjures the body as the trace of a sooty hand appears, spectrally, on a crumpled paper towel...