170 frames, each 9.53H x 3.07W x 1.18D inches
Pedro Reyes’s Los Mutantes ( Mutants , 2012) is composed of 170 plates that combine characters from ancient and modern mythologies. As in a periodic table, animals and objects are combined with humans (male or female), providing a rational framework for the irrational products of human imagination. A Cartesian matrix such as this must follow certain rules. All figures are half-human, half-something. Animal/cartoon characters that speak, such as Fritz the Cat or Donald Duck, are excluded, as well as oddities and chimeras without recognizable human features. Their arrangement results in combinations such as fish plus woman equals mermaid; bull plus man equals minotaur, and so on. The juxtapositions cross figures from pop culture with those from ancient myths, encouraging us to notice similarities between religious icons and comic-book characters. All of these “mutants” reveal something about our desire to extract qualities of animals or objects and empower ourselves with them. Mythologies are a reflection of the paradigms of their time, and this kind of periodic table presents a rational framework to categorize irrational products of the imagination.
Pedro Reyes’s works traverse the worlds of art, film, architecture, design, social criticism, and pedagogy. Educated as an architect, Reyes draws on this training to engage with utopian aspirations and the ongoing legacy of Modernism, often focusing on issues of scale and space while questioning pressing social issues through the incitement of individual or collective interaction. Although only a few of his works are directly located within the practice of building, almost all involve some kind of construction, whether they are objects, models, interiors, or social spaces. Reyes also makes use of strategies developed for communication or education, as well as everyday humor, to engage his audiences. Many of his works either allow large-scale public engagement or suggest a possible use: weapons turned to shovels, multilevel parks in old modernist buildings, and small spherical rooms. Like many avant-garde thinkers of the past, Reyes constructs new forms of architecture necessary for new ways of life.
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...
Wright Imperial Hotel (2004) is a sort of bow and arrow made out of feathers, a São Paulo phone book, and other materials...
Mario Garcia Torres imagines cinematic devices to replay stories occasionally forgotten by Conceptual art...
The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits...
Fabiola Torres-Alzaga plays with magic, illusion, and sleight-of-hand, fabricating installations, drawings, and films that toy with our perceptions...
This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...
San Pedro is a seaside city, part of the Los Angeles Harbor, sitting on the edge of a channel...
Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
The American War , which takes its title from the Vietnamese term for what Americans call the Vietnam War, has toured the United States extensively with the goal of presenting a Vietnamese perspective of that history...
Gabriel Kuri has created a series of works in which he juxtaposes perennial and ephemeral materials...
Mariana Castillo Deball’s set of kill hole plates are part of a larger body of work problematizing archeological narratives, and drawing attention to the conservation process and its role in recreating an imagined object...
Fridge-Freezer is a 2-channel video installation where Yoshua Okón explores the darker side of suburbia, d escribed by the artist as “ the ideal environment for a numb existence of passive consumerism and social a nd environmental disengagement...
The two drawings in the Kadist Collection are part of a larger series entitled Las Mariposas Eternas (The Eternal Butterflies)...
Contrabando is a work that references the larger sociological phenomenon in which immigrant economic strategies come to infiltrate urban landscapes...