Art Elsewhere

Contemporary Art from Latin America and the Caribbean Submit to: [email protected]

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The Future Will Be Fiction, Joaquín Aras at Móvil in Buenos Aires, Argentina

El Futuro Será una Ficción [The Future Will Be Fiction]

Joaquín Aras at Móvil

Iguazó #451, Parque Patricios, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Open Friday and Saturday 3pm - 7pm and by appointment: [email protected]

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Paeonias, Juan Fernández at La Productora in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Paeonias

Juan Fernández (JUFE) at La Productora

Calle Ernesto Cerra 628, San Juan, Puerto Rico

October 15 - November 12

By appointment only: [email protected]

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This. The history of a lover blue as the sky never shy, Ricardo Morales Hernández

September 3rd - October 3rd 2016

East Hampton Shed recently opened This. The history of a lover blue as the sky never shy, the first U.S. solo presentation by Ricardo Morales-Hernández.

The process in which Ricardo Morales-Hernández formulates his canvases is both intuitive and rigorous. The attention shown to a somewhat harsh array of materials melds readily with his fluid and lyrical strokes. The presented series of works float ambiguously through abstraction between a figure and landscape. The resulting images are emotionally jarring, but beautiful at once. Morales-Hernández’s questions of the rational, typical of historical landscape paintings, is married with a diverse range of material considerations. Terming the series “compost paintings”, the surfaces are layered and collaged with materials from his archives, dating from 2009 to the present, some of which were components of former, dismantled works, and some collected from the surrounding tropical environment. The substantial amount of layering results is a form of reverse archaeology constituting a “reflection of emotional and spiritual status, compressed as a summary”. This summary, memory made physical, is epitomized in the color blue, yet counterpointed by its source. The blue comes from construction chalk, used for snap lining, temporarily gridding out physical surfaces. The works coalesce in the absurdity of attempting to take architectonic measurements of emotional states.

Morales-Hernández’s omnivorous approach to materials and technique is an embodiment of the political and cultural status of the Puerto Rican colony, where crisis and often struggle manifest itself in the form of acquisition and survival. His musical graphism and botanical oriented drawings are almost fueled by his memories and the grammar of landscape, literally using sticks and stones, artist made charcoal, sand, stitches, collage, and construction chalk employed in additive and subtractive process mirroring the scalability of memory and sentiment.

Ricardo Morales-Hernández (b. 1980)

The practice of Ricardo Morales-Hernández(b.1980) consists in drawing a personal, political and cosmic story. He uses analog, digital and biological media with a main focus in extemporal drawing. Known for his paradisiac imagery evoking musical notations and reminiscent of the natural ecosystem of the colony of Puerto Rico. Historical relations can be traced from: primitive markings, medieval marginalia, neo-expressionism and post-digital aesthetics while at the same time questioning the dominant morphology of contemporary art. He deserted studies in Media Arts, Religion and Social Sciences and been recipient of AIR–CPW- Andy Warhol Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and Center for Image Science in Austria among others. Lives and works in San Juan, PR. His work has been the subject of solo presentations at Walter Otero, San Juan, PR; Unpainted, Munich, DE; and La Productora, Santurce, PR. He has been included in group exhibitions at Museo San Juan, PR; Manifiesto Composta-LAB, PR, Peripher, Zurich, CH; The Center of Photography at Woodstock, NY; and Museo Las Americas,PR

Ricardo Morales-Hernández ricardomorales-hernandez.com

East Hampton Shed http://easthamptonshed.com

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Present Standard, a group show at the Chicago Cultural Center

PRESENT STANDARD

Curated by Edra Soto and Josue Pellot

January 30 - April 24, 2016

Chicago Cultural Center

Artists: Alberto Aguilar, Cándida Álvarez, Luis Miguel Bendaña, Paola Cabal, Juan Ángel Chavez, Mariano Chávez, Alejandro Figueredo Díaz-Perera, Dianna Frid, Diana Gabriel, Maria Gaspar, Melissa Leandro, José Lerma, Ivan Lozano, Jorge Lucero, Victoria Martínez, Harold Méndez, Sofía Moreno, Nora Nieves, Josué Pellot, Maddie Reyna, Luis Romero, Luis Sahagun, Chris Silva, Edra Soto, Rafael E. Vera

Catalogue essays contributors: Stephanie Cristello, Alison Fraunhar, Kristin Korolowicz, Teresa Silva, JGV.WAR

PRESENT STANDARD gathers 25 works by 25 contemporary, US-based Latino artists who are in one way or another identified as native, linguistic or geographic immigrants. The artists each play with the manifold meanings of "present" – as in contemporary, attending or existing – and "standard" – referring to a flag or pennant, measuring tactic, guiding principle or a potent symbol of national identity.

The work in this exhibition reflects through a filter of Latino immigrant experiences and the artists’ connection with and separation from their homes, their ancestry and their language. However, beyond this generalized and arbitrary commonality, they share little else – not artistic practice, gender identification or sexuality, or place of origin. The inescapable label “Latino/a” insists that whatever these artists do will be read through a screen of “identity” and “representation. Present Standard carefully seeks to underscore the pluralism that exists in contemporary art made by Latino/a artists.

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The decision of move from one’s homeland is never simple and immigrating, or any act of moving to a new country, can both produce moments of settling and endless questioning for the rest of an individual’s life. Present Standard gathers a group of twenty-five contemporary, US-based Latino artists who are in one way or another identified as native, linguistic, or geographic immigrants. They are also artists with rich connections to Chicago who carry the impact of mainstream and cosmopolitan influences in their work that converses at a global level. Present Standard subsequently focuses on how these artists work within the centuries-old patriotic art tradition of flag-making to convey the wide range of experiences of moving in, out, and away—and their limitless tangents.

Present, meaning today or contemporary, Standard—meaning a pennant, measuring tactic, or guiding principle—queries the symbolic registers of flags as both intimate and personal reflections, and as the official embodiment of a nation. The artists gathered in this exhibition surely reflect the contemporary art world’s growing interest in the idyllic and imagined symbolism of flag formats. At the same time, they interrogate the historic political, civic, corporate weight embedded within flags as bountiful sites to diverge from their conventional function and presentation, and to comment upon questions of place, identity, and nationhood. Through the filter of Latino immigrant artists’ experiences, contemporary traditions of flag-making take on new bearings as they simultaneously homogenize and reveal the spectral range of interpreting migration, home, and patriotism in art.

A rich collection of five experts in Chicago’s art and culture spheres has been invited to contribute descriptive essays of five artists with whom they share stylistic or conceptual commonalities. Critical writer, curator, and editor Stephanie Cristello explores the work of Candida Alvarez, Melissa Leandro, Nora Nieves, Luis Romero and Edra Soto, which gestures to modern and contemporary decorative arts and abstraction. Dr. Allison Fraunhar’s work as a professor of Latin American art and cinema speaks well to the work of Alejandro Figueredo Diaz-Perera, Diana Gabriel, Ivan Lozano, Sofía Moreno, and Luis Sahagun, who variously interrogate body politics and the physicality in their work. The researcher and curator Kristin Korolowicz discusses the conceptual based works of Luis Miguel Bendaña, José Lerma, Victoria Martínez, Josué Pellot, and Maddie Reyna, whereas collaborators, researchers, and curators J. Gibrán Villalobos and William A. Ruggiero (JGV/WAR) elaborate on Alberto Aguilar, Juan Angel Chavez, Maria Gaspar, Chris Silva, and Rafael E. Vera—artists whose work is impacted by collaborative and social practices. Finally, the curator andDirector of Exhibitions & Residencies with the Chicago Artists Coalition Teresa Silva focuses on the interdisciplinary artists Paola Cabal, Mariano Chavez, Dianna Frid, Jorge Lucero and Harold Mendez.

— Edra Soto and Josue Pellot

Alberto Aguilar

Diana Gabriel

Iván Lozano

José Lerma

Maddie Reyan

María Gaspar

Paola Cabal

Rafael E. Vera

Sofía Moreno

Victoria Martínez

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Mapas del Cerro,  Chemi Rosado Seijo at Embajada in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Mapas del Cerro, Chemi Rosado Seijo

January 16 - March 19, 2016 Opening January 16, 6pm

Embajada is pleased to present Mapas del Cerro, a solo exhibition of new works by artist Chemi Rosado-Seijo, January 16 – March 19, 2016. Mapas del Cerro continues Chemi Rosado-Seijo’s long-term engagement with the community of El Cerro, a rural, working-class community embedded in the mountains of Naranjito, Puerto Rico. The project was initiated in 2002 by painting the exteriors of residents’ homes different shades of green, paying homage to the way the community has been built in harmony with the topography of the mountains where it stands. Through negotiation and collaboration with community leaders, volunteers, students and residents, over 100 homes have been painted.

In 2010 Rosado-Seijo and the El Cerro community began the arduous process of repainting the homes. In preparing the surface of the walls they scratched and peeled off layers of paint from years of accumulation, which were saved and later brought into the studio to be re-examined. By framing the readymade forms that the remnants of paint created, Rosado-Seijo developed a series of works that catalogue artifacts from the project while referencing topographical maps that the paint fragments resemble. 

For Los Mapas del Cerro, Rosado-Seijo continues working with the paint remnants to create forms that reference specific and broader terrains such as the island of Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, the Americas, or the world. The fragments are presented as specimens, viewable from either side, revealing the residues from bygone years. Playing the role of cartographer and historian, Rosado-Seijo constructs narratives filled with political and geographic tensions while reminding us of the interconnectedness of human architecture. Framed using locally sourced wood from native palm trees, Rosado-Seijo further imbues the works with an Arcadian sensibility. 

Born in Vega Alta, Puerto Rico, Chemi Rosado-Seijo graduated from the painting department of the Puerto Rico School of Visual Arts in 1997. In 2000, Rosado had his first solo show at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona. He inaugurated the ongoing project El Cerro in 2002, working with residents of the El Cerro community, to present public art projects, workshops and other community initiatives. In 2005 he collaborated on a project with Art in General in which he mapped Manhattan from the perspective of a skateboarder, re-drawing the city in terms of its skating sites. In 2006, he inaugurated La Perla’s Bowl, a sculpture built with residents of San Juan’s La Perla community that functions as both a skateboarding ramp and an actual pool. Rosado-Seijo has participated in numerous exhibitions and biennials including the Whitney (2002), Prague (2005), Havana (2006), Pontevedra (2010) and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (2014). Most recently, in May of 2015, Rosado-Seijo was granted The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artist as Activist Fellowship for El Cerro, honoring artists pursuing ambitious creative projects with a social purpose. 

For more information, please contact the gallery at [email protected]. 

EMBAJADA is a project space serving as a platform for international dialogue located in the Hato Rey neighborhood of San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Calle Cesar Gonzalez 382 San Juan, Puerto Rico 00918 787-220-1676 Open Saturdays from 1-6pm and by appointment [email protected]

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The Chagos Embassy of Puerto Rico at Embajada in San Juan, Puerto Rico

The Chagos Embassy of Puerto Rico, organized by Paula Naughton

January 16 - March 19, 2016 Opening January 16, 6pm

Embajada is delighted to announce it will host The Chagos Embassy of Puerto Rico from January 16 – March 19, 2016. The Chagos Embassy works to promote Chagossian interests in Puerto Rico. In an effort to develop relations, friendship and common understanding, we invite visitors to the embassy with an aim of furthering the dialogue and exchange between Chagossians and Puerto-Ricans in all fields. To mark the occasion of the establishment of diplomatic relations between The Chagos Islands and Puerto Rico, the Embassy presents work by Chagossian artist, Clement Siatous. Through personal memories, Siatous paints tableaux depicting the history of The Chagos Islands. Defying official record, Siatous acts as a radical historian, constructing an archive that reclaims a nations heritage and offers a counter narrative to an erased history. The Chagos Islands are an isolated archipelago located in the Indian Ocean. The entire population was expelled by the British Government to make way for a US naval base in 1973. The base, on the island of Diego Garcia, also known as Camp Justice or Footprint of Freedom, has become one of the most strategic bases in the US global War on Terror and a known transit site for CIA rendition exercises. Since eviction, the Chagossian diaspora have lived between Mauiritus, the Seychelles and more recently Britain. The UK Government created a fiction that a permanent population never existed – a claim made easy to uphold due to sparse photographic documentation, which until recently, mainly existed in dispersed military and government archives. Photographic material obtained from a variety of sources, such as retired US Navy Seabees, military museums and WikiLeaks is displayed in the embassy, as an accessible record. We welcome and encourage visitors to explore the embassy, and hope you will come to better understand and appreciate the Chagos Nation, people, culture, and history. This embassy is dedicated to the displaced Chagossian diaspora and all those who have helped tell their story. With special thanks to The Chagos Refugees Group for their dedication and support.

The Chagos Embassy is an exhibition curated by Paula Naughton, which takes the form of a diplomatic space. As a stateless nation the Chagossian diaspora are marginalized and invisible to the international political community. The exhibition seeks to highlight this disenfranchised status and interrogate archive material, bringing into question the power structures that establish our history, identity and the intertwined relationships between memory and state. The Chagos Embassy and its programming is part of an on-going multi-media project called The New Atlantis, newatlantisproject.com. 

EMBAJADA is a project space serving as a platform for international dialogue located in the Hato Rey neighborhood of San Juan, Puerto Rico

Calle Cesar Gonzalez 382 San Juan, Puerto Rico 00918 787-220-1676 Open Saturdays from 1-6pm and by appointment [email protected]

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Marina Alessio and Daniel Melo, That isn't love at Big Sur in Buenos Aires, Argentina

That isn't love

Big Sur Carlos Calvo, 637 PB Buenos Aires, Argentina

December 19, 2014 - February 2016

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Chemi Rosado-Seijo, Jorge González and Ricardo Morales-Hernández in Manifiesto Composta at LAB in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Manifiesto Composta 

Organized by Ricardo Morales in Salute of the 4th Polygraphic Triennial of San Juan, Latin America and the Caribbean. 

LAB: Laboratorio de Artes Binarios, Santurce, Puerto Rico 

October 22 - December 15, 2015

Manifiesto Composta brings together the interventions of Jorge González,  Chemi Rosado-Seijo, and Ricardo Morales who work with theological,   ecological, aesthetic, and social perspectives on decomposition and regeneration through long-term projects. 

While Rosado-Seijo carries out his second photographic intervention in over ten years on El Cerro [the Hill] in Naranjito and intervenes in the space with a cross drawing  ramp/machine  referencing medieval architecture, Jorge González transfers artisanal labor  in order to intervene in modern  architecture referencing local production models and material culture. Morales-Hernández, in the process of writing and publishing his first treatise after 20 years of continuous work, introduces a new series of precarious paintings (SOS), and continues to open his visual/narrative process to the participation of volunteers via internet and in nomadic workshops in Europe and Latin America. 

The program includes events during the three months of the showing where visits, talks, workshops will take place as part of the process. It will culminate with a limited-edition text and visual references of the showing. A second round will be negotiated in the space for 2016.

Acknowledgments: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, LAB: Laboratorio de Artes Binarios, Programa de Artes Plásticas, Rauschenberg Foundation, Area: Lugar de proyectos, Para la Naturaleza and Beta-Local. 

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I IN THE SKY, a project by Edra Soto at Pedestrian Project in Chicago

December 2, 2015 - February 12, 2016

Opening Performances and Public Receptions Wednesday, December 2, 2015 from 12:00 - 1:00 pm & 5:00 - 6:00 pm

The President’s Gallery at Harold Washington College presents I IN THE SKY, a solo exhibition by Chicago-based artist Edra Soto.   ​Curated by Jason Pallas.

Edra Soto's exhibition I IN THE SKY is an experimental installation that challenges the structural procedures presumed for gallery display.  

Complementary visual and sonorous experiences will unfold in front of the audience during the opening receptions as the show's installation arrives via performative gestures.  Soto will create all new work that picks up and riffs on projects from her artistic oeuvre - for example, depicting a timeline that features mainstream cultural characters influential to her upbringing in Puerto Rico; creating overlapping sounds of laughter, instrumental sounds, and live actions; or covering the existing institutional furniture in colorfully patterned and adorned textiles.  The artist's goal for this show is to create a clashing, cacophonous space that embodies her I while distancing itself into the Sky.  

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(un) monuments for V. Tatlin, Marcelo Cidade at Galleria Continua in San Gimignano, Italy

Opening: Saturday October 31st 2015, Arco dei Becci 1, 6pm-11pm Until 09.01.2016, Monday–Saturday, 10am–1pm, 2–7pm

Via del Castello 11, San Gimignano, Italy

Galleria Continua is pleased to host (un) monuments for V. Tatlin, a new solo show by Marcelo Cidade, in its San Gimignano exhibition space.

Between 1964 and 1990 the American artist Dan Flavin produced a series of sculptures called Monuments. Made from fluorescent tubes, they were a tribute to the constructivist Vladimir Tatlin, referencing the Russian artist and architect’s Monument to the Third International, or Tatlin’s Tower. This immense tower had been conceived as the home to the Third International, following the 1917 Revolution, and was to have been the beacon of the Monumental Propaganda planned by Lenin.

In the series (un) monuments for V. Tatlin, Marcelo Cidade recreates Flavin’s Monuments using structures for fluorescent tubes. While Flavin’s aim in using the lights was to stress the temporariness of materials and, therefore, of systems – “the American minimalist aesthetic is articulated as an observation of the industrial degradation of Fordism and emphasizes the appropriation of no longer used elements and a new critical functionality”, Cidade specifies – the Brazilian artist explores the theme of ruins. In the works re-created by Cidade, there is no further space for temporariness, there are only the useless remnants of a Utopian plan. “In the 2015 works”, Cidade explains, “we will not see any more blown lights, just the recovered structures of abandoned buildings, unused for a long time and charged with the memory of the deterioration of their own original spaces. The structures are rusty, dirty and without any recoverable system that can turn back on the light with which Flavin intended to “wash” the exhibition spaces where the works were to be presented. Light could be read as a kind of nostalgia, or the hope of seeing a resumption in the construction project dreamt of by the Soviet artists. In my works the Monuments are anachronistic, and serve merely to monumentalize the decline and failure of such a project; this, perhaps, symbolizes the mission of the modern avant-garde movements. In the (un) monuments for V. Tatlin, the promises of the modern world are retrograde and, perhaps, reactionary.” 

Marcelo Cidade was born in São Paulo in 1979, where he lives and works. The artist’s aesthetic inquiries revolve around borderline art, a theme he experiments with in a conceptual key through a practice that is often subversive and non-representational, but always directed towards teasing out the expressive possibilities silently interwoven into an urban space. By means of various aesthetic operations, Cidade invents new idioms, constructing fresh and surprising spaces, and bringing out heterotopies, many of which are possible experiments for linking art and life. This art-life relationship authorizes the artist to operate within a continual oscillating flow between the social and the personal sphere. Comparing socially established relations and values, Cidade produces an “aesthetics of resistance”, creates works that express complex social conflicts and brings signs and situations from on the street into spaces given over to art. The artist’s works emphasize the coming together of art and society, without neglecting poetic expression and a discussion of language, also inspired politically by notions of challenge and transgression. One of Cidade’s interests is the public space generated in the urban and technological flux of the surveillance society. He concentrates on one place to reach another one, setting in motion a process of dislocation from the historic-geographic to the poetic. The artist has exhibited at Tate Liverpool, at the Museo d’Arte Moderna MAM SP in São Paulo, at the Triennale of Architecture in Lisbon, at the CCSP - Centro Cultural São Paulo, at MUSAC - Castilla y Léon in Spain, at the 27th Biennale of São Paulo and, in 2013, at the Broad Art Museum and the Krannert Art Museum in Illinois. Invited to take part in the Biennale of Carrara in 2010, he presented large blocks of marble on which he painted three accusations (White Blood, White Hold, White Power).

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God's Reptilian Finger, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa at Gasworks, London, UK

26 NOV 15 – 7 FEB 16

Gasworks presents God’s Reptilian Finger, the first UK solo exhibition by Guatemalan artist Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa.

Ramírez-Figueroa’s practice is rooted in folklore and dreams, conspiracy theories, ancient mythologies and magic.

Ramírez-Figueroa’s practice is rooted in folklore and dreams, conspiracy theories, ancient mythologies and magic. The Guatemalan civil war of 1960–96 is a recurring subject in his work, softened only by the at times absurd or humorous approach that colours many of his sculptures, performances and works on paper.

Past works by the artist include the video A Brief History of Architecture in Guatemala (2010–13), which shows three amateur dancers (including the artist himself) shuffling about to a traditional marimba melody in costumes that represent different Guatemalan architectural styles. As the work progresses their outfits gradually fall apart to reveal their bare bodies in a pointed, if tongue-in-cheek, criticism of Guatemala’s policies of urban renewal. In the theatrical installation Props for Eréndira (2014), on the other hand, Ramírez-Figueroa excavates Gabriel García Márquez’s 1972 novella The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Souless Grandmother about a girl forced into prostitution by her grandmother after accidently burning down the family home. As if setting the stage for a drama about to unfold, vividly painted polystyrene sculptures of key objects from the life of the protagonist are set against pink-smoke wallpaper.

Using similar methods, the two newly commissioned sculptural installations that comprise God’s Reptilian Finger focus on the amateur archaeology practiced by Mormon missionaries in Guatemala since 1947 and current followers of contemporary British conspiracy theorist David Icke.

In the first gallery, four gold geometric shapes made of polystyrene and resin shield nesting swarms of swelling jelly worms. Titled Babylonian Fantasy, these works are inspired by Icke’s view that the global ruling classes are the descendants of the ‘Babylonian Brotherhood’ – the name he gives to an ancient extra-terrestrial reptilian race, originating in the Middle East.

In the second installation, God’s Reptilian Finger, a giant, glowing replica of God’s finger hovers in mid-air in a black-lit gallery. Surrounded and illuminated by floating stones painted in phosphorescent colours, this work appropriates the unsanctioned mythology of Mormon missionaries in Guatemala who sought to conjure up evidence of Western influence upon pre-Columbian civilisations.

Turning such delirious theories on their head, God’s Reptilian Finger offers up a vision of a critical, hybrid mythology that blurs the boundaries between religion and speculation, evangelism and imperialism.

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Minerals, a limited edition Lino Cut print designed by Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, for Gasworks, is available to buy from our online shop here.

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Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa holds a BFA from Emily Carr University in Vancouver and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was a post-graduate researcher at Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht in 2013. He has participated in various solo and group exhibitions including the 13th Lyon Biennial (2015); the 10th Gwangju biennial (2014); A Chronicle of Interventions, Tate Modern, London (2014); Illy Present Future 2013 Prize Exhibition, Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Beber y leer el arcoiris, Casa América, Madrid (2012); Home Works IV, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2008); and the 53rd Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (2007). He is a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a Franklin Furnace award and an Akademie Schloss Solitude fellowship (selected by Dan Graham), and recently won the 2015 ARCO Region of Madrid Award for Young Artists. Ramírez-Figueroa lives and works in Guatemala City, Guatemala.

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Lxs Brutxs, Ramiro Chaves at Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, MX

Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City 

October 29th – February 28th, 2015

Argentinean-born and Mexico City-based artist Ramiro Chaves presents Lxs Brutxs, an installation arising from his parallel interests in architecture, language, identity and history, and which constitutes a reflection about individuality versus collectiv- ity.

The installation comprises a series of 250 small-format sculptures (approximately 30 x 40 cm each), made from a variety of poor materials, each of which has a brick base in the form of the bottom half of the letter “X”. The spectator can view these works in three ways: as individual sculptures, as groups, or as a multitude.

They represent solitary and isolated characters, unaware of their origin or that they’re in contact with others like them.

These cement beings carry on a symbolic dialogue in which each speaks uniquely and whispers stories of a time oscillat- ing between the archaeological and the forensic; they appear to come from a comic full of references to childhood games, brutalist and organic architecture, Mexican Muralism, art brut, concrete poetry and ritual elements.

To Chaves, this work alludes to that of Mexican muralists and architects like Diego Rivera and Juan O’Gorman, and to clas- sic materials such as obsidian stone, volcanic rock, and brick. It is also a reflection on color, given that certain tones com- mon to these referents predominate the work.

The name of the exhibition, Chaves explains, gives rise to a play on meanings that has to do with art brut, an artistic genre related to certain childlike imagination (it’s worth mentioning that Chaves teaches art to children), and brutalist architecture, so called for its use of cement.

Similarly, the exhibition establishes a dialogue with the architectural features of the central gallery at the Museo Universitario del Chopo. In this incredibly tall space, the diminutive works form a visually appealing scale for the viewer.

Lxs Brutxs is part of an ongoing investigation for the artist, preceded by his project, XXXXXXXXXX, a publication on the use of the letter “X” in Mexican architecture.

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THIS SERVES FOR IMMORTALITY AMONG OTHER THINGS 

two fried eggs on a spoon

“Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.” — Roberto Bolaño

“Being equis stems from being x in the algebraic sense: a mystery, or something that could assume any value, in other words, something unknown. That is to say, being equis denotes lack of popularity or mediocrity; it’s the same as being gray, not excelling and not being important.” — Internet

Lxs Brutxs are a group of individuals, who were or want to be a MULTITUDE. Insecure folks, who appear to be Mexican. However, they are not, yet still they cement a common ground. Chromosomes: (from the Greek chroma = color and soma = body).

Color and body. The sum of bodies is the result of a society ... From the division of colors derives the chromatic, also known as racism. Although we deny that this means INFORMATION. Color and body.

The sum of information is the result of our experience. In scientific terms, DNA. We store data, cells, dates, proteins, memo- ries, molecule-doings, faces, bodies, we even store art. But sometimes we forget. Our cells divide. In many organisms, one of the pairs of homologous chromosomes is different from the rest, determining the sex of the subject. XX-XY

We understand ourselves as individuals. Out of the ordinary. But ... you who are reading this, you’re part of a community, like it or not. Standing in front of your peers, imagine what these beings of stone and bone might be saying. You hear whispers that rise into the air like imperceptible smoke.

Lxs Brutxs live a wildcat strike. Standing silently, they shout slogans of love. They march rampant toward the tide of con- tradictions inescapable in our time. A silent strike. A motionless demonstration. These beings present unique voices that narrate histories ancestrally present. From a mass grave dug by the state, as well as your last post on Facebook, the success of a party, a community under the influence, the secret of personality lost amidst the crowd, the crumbling of a concrete society, or a nursery burning, Juan O’Gorman’s cave or your gaze distracted away from this text by a passing butt and the thousands of XY killed in the north. You remember all of this; it is part of your vital information.

This group of individuals is a reflection of you and me. All the people we are in the laboratory of life. All the differences that bring us together.

Is it the same to kill a mosquito as to kill a lion?

— Juan Caloca

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Ramiro Chaves (b. Cordoba, Argentina, 1979) has exhibited in both individual and group exhibitions in Mexico includ- ing the Carrillo Gil Art Museum, El Eco Experimental Museum, MUCA Roma, the XI and XVI Photography Biennials at the Center for the Image, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of the Palace of Fine Arts, the Amparo Museum in Puebla, and the MASIN in Sinaloa, as well as in various galleries and institutions in France, the United States, Spain, Holland, Aus- tria, Germany, Argentina and Japan.

Chaves was artist in residence in 2015 at Beta Local, Puerto Rico; he received an Honorable Mention in the XVI Photography Biennila at the Center for the Image (2014); he was artist in residence in the International Studio and Curatorial Pro- gram in New York (2013) with the support of FONCA/Conaculta; and he was selected for the Bancomer-MACG Program 2012-2014. He has also published various books, most recently two limited edition publications, La Loma del Orto (2015) and XXXXXXXXXX (2014).

His work belongs to the collections of Mexico City’s University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC-UNAM), the CIAC Isabel and Agustín Coppel Collection, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, and the Archive of the Center for the Image, as well as numerous private collections in Mexico and abroad.

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Anti Tropicalia, Carlos Amorales at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in San José, Costa Rica

Anti Tropicalia, a show by Carlos Amorales and curated by Stefan Benchoam

Sept 16 - Nov 12, 2015

Museum de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, San José, Costa Rica

Throughout the years, Carlos Amorales’ practice has been characterised by an insaciable interest in drawing, approaching it through a great diversity of techniques, proceses, and scales. His drawings function as tools to investigate a series of omnipresent concerns in his work, in which his profound closeness to graphic arts (through the creation of posters, newspapers, prints, album covers, and numerous publications) and his great fascination for music in all of its genres and forms, stand out. Additionally, he has always been keen to collaborate with other musicians and artists. Specifically, there are two who stand out: Julián Lede, with whom he has worked in repeated occasions throughout his career, and Joaquin Orellana, with whom he has collaborated several times since they first met in Guatemala en el 2012.

Anti Tropicalia gathers various bodies of work that evidence Amorales’ long trajectory in the fine arts, and explore his zeal for drawing and music as working tools, and interest in generating individual and collaborative works. This exhibition presents two monumental drawings Fax Mantra 05 and Fax Mantra 06 (realised for Manifesta 9, in 2012, using a printing machine that prints/draws with charcoals), ten large scale drawings of the Notations for the use of typography series (created by the artist in his studio en Mexico City in 2015), one hundred and thirty small scale drawings from the Havana Suite (realised for the most recent edition of the Havana Biennial in 2015), and a new monumental drawing installation that covers the museum’s walls. This latter one hasn’t been created using traditional working tools or cutting edge printers, but rather through ten 3D printed graphite sculptures in the shape of güiros (Latin-American percussion instruments consisting of an open-ended, hollow gourd with parallel notches cut in one side) that counteract their original form and use are alternatively used as drawing utensils.

Also included in the show (and by sheer chance!) is a series of replicas of Joaquín Orellana’s útiles sonoros (sound utensils) that were constructed through instructions in 2012 in Costa Rica, as they were to be used for a two concert tour in his honour. Since then, the útiles sonoros had been poorly stored and were deteriorating in San José, until the day before the exhibition was due to open, and when they were shown to us. After finding them covered in spiderwebs and moths, we immediately decided to take them to the Museum, where we cleaned them up and put them in conversation with the other works in the show.

Additionally, a series of video works that are directly bound to music are exhibited. Amongst them, isThe Sorcerer’s Apprentice (2013) together with Orellana’s Fantasia (2013) which came about after having met Orellana, and in which they reinterpret the infamous sorcerer’s apprentice scene in Walt Disney’s Fantasia; Psychophony (2008) in which numerous drawings from the artists liquid archive are musicalised by a digital player piano; and Erased Symphony (2013) which explores the direct implications of how to interpret a symphonic ensamble after the musical scores (originally printed in graphite) have been erased and re-drawn.
 

We hope that the spectators to this exhibition delve into Amorales and Orellana’s practice through various representative bodies of work that combine visual practice with music.

- Stefan Benchoam

[artelsewhere-blog]

Margaritas, Carlos Alfonso at SKETCH Gallery in Bogotá, Colombia

Carlos Alfonso - Margaritas, Nov 12 - Jan 20

SKETCH Gallery               

Calle 75A,No.20C-12, Bogotá- Colombia 

sketchroom.co

It isn’t black, nor white, and neither gray, and in an unfixed position, Margaritas is made out of fictions which are broken into two moments –the things that already exist and the mutation of these existences. In this process, what persists is represented in images and objects, and its transformation is a continuation of themselves, in a sequence of operations that are based on sculptural, pictorial and narrative principles.

Some drawings suggest a silence and are close to comics in its composition, others become a gesture where time is a replaceable variable and these prove a performative act. The paintings isolate. The sculptures are more assemblages than objects, and in a state of suspension, tension and compression, each piece is essential to justify a dialogue within each other, intimately related, suggesting a physical dependence that simulates the presence of an organism. The video "The last dream of Armando" is an assemblage as well, the content is mainly photographs of the artist and images found on Internet. Together, they create an incomplete story, its not the beginning nor the end, it rather stands in the middle of a series of events ranging from non-existent rituals and mythological chronicles, to the brain trepanation as a treatment for removing dreams. If a line is drawn between reality and fiction, it is in the background of this video where the illusion of Margaritas is detained.

With an ironic tone, each piece in the space is a decision thought as a knot that joins and articulates, and in the case of the nautical knot named “Margarita”, its function is to reduce the length of a rope without cutting it, in an unusual bond, without being weakened or transformed, preserving its integrity. Thus the framework of the exhibition is constructed by this analogy, where almost everything is an abstraction, imitating the logic of subversion, and following the rhythm of the Trojan horse, if there is something that looks like reality it’s only conciliation between Margaritas and its interpretation.

Carlos Alfonso 1986 Popayán, Colombia. (Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium)

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“Wilfredo Chiesa: Paintings,” at Obra Galería in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Wilfredo Chiesa: Paintings

Obra Galería                                                                                                          301 Calle Cruz                                                                                                       Old San Juan, Puerto Rico

Tuesday - Saturday 1:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.

http://www.obragaleria.com

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Rooftop: A double origin, Ulrik López at Galería Agustina Ferreyra in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Ulrik López                                                                                                       Azotea: un doble origen

Opening: Thursday, October 22nd 6-9 pm                                                    October 22nd- November 21st                                                                          Wed-Sat, 12-6 pm or by appointment                              www.agustinaferreyra.com

Galería Agustina Ferreyra is pleased to present Azotea: un doble origen (Rooftop: a double origin) Ulrik Lopez’s  rst solo exhibition at the gallery. For the occasion, López (Mexico City, 1989) addresses the rooftop as a place of double origin; that of ourselves and our cities, drawing an analogy with the gallery as a communal space of creation, and using reinterpreted clothes dryers, commonly found in Mexico City’s Azoteas, to explore creational myths, origins, and a possible formal support for ideologies.

In De la Nada (Out of Nothing) (2015), López plays with the idea of the creational myth ex nihilo, and in a consciously useless attempt, aims to contain a series of material representations of the void in an single object; the void as a hole, the hole as absence of matter, or not... the hole as a pause, as a new dimension, as a block, a portal. In Acerca del Mar Primordial (About the Primal Sea)(2015), the artist takes water as the creational element par excellence, and suspends this dryer corresponding series of drawings in two main planes; a horizontal one, similar to the limit between the ocean and the sky, and a second one, reminiscent of the breaking point of a waterfall, the mouth of a river, the rupture of a plane. In Montañas, Cuevas y Piedras (Mountains, Caves and Stones) (2015), López uses these three places/things, equally important and symbolically charged for Taínos and Incas, Navajos and Zulus, and suspends yet another cluster of drawings that reference the particular stories behind each of the myths; the cave from where life emanated, the myth of what disappears only to re surface as a mountain, the two stones from which man emerged. Lastly, in El Todo (The Whole) (2015), the artist hangs a ‘total’ group of drawings, constituting a possible personal origin. For López, the urban rooftop landscapes are similar to the primal landscapes; the Azoteas are for washing, there’s water; there are no stones, but there are bricks; no mountains, but plenty of water tanks. The dryers are then ideological support structures, from which López hangs personal conjectures and formal games, that once again and just like any other ‘tenant’ on its rooftop, shape the gallery space and transforms it into an observatory, a laboratory, a personal and communal point of departure and development, a window to understand what we see and what surrounds us.

Special thanks to : Cynthia Morales, Marxz Rosado and the Escuela de Artes Plásticas Design Workshop.

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Every time I encounter death I think about you, Emmanuelle Lainé at IFAL Casa de Francia, Mexico City, MX

Every time I encounter death I think about you An exhibition of Emmanuelle Lainé

Curated by Dorothee Dupuis

IFAL Casa de Francia Havre 15, Col. Juárez 06500 Ciudad de México, D.F. http://ifal.mx

From October 17th to November 21st, 2015 Free entrance from Tuesday to Saturday 12:00 to 20:00 hours

In the past few years Emmanuelle Lainé has developed installations that mix actions on site, premeditated gestures, and trompe-l’oeil images, proposing to consider the studio as a conceptual matrix of production, emancipated from its physical, almost domestic dimension. The exhibition spaces that host her artworks are studied previously, with the objective of maximizing the alteration of the characteristics of the space through simple techniques, but visually spectacular. The installations mix photos of spaces with physical elements, that are not clarified as part of the artwork, adding to the impression of  general chaos, and materializing indirectly the presence of the artist. The works of Emmanuelle Lainé engage boldly with the space, considering the workshop and the exhibition space as mediums in and of themselves. Making here is intended as a way to produce thinking, connecting her work to current debates about “post-workshop” artistic practices. For Lainé, photography is a tool like any other, which allows her to actualize the problematics linked to traditional artistic genres such as the still life or baroque painting,  with its collections of out-of-scale objects and complicated perspectives.

For the exhibition at the Casa de Francia, the artist decided to play with the possible confusion between the gallery space and another exhibition venue in which she realized – and documented – an installation three years ago, at les Ateliers des Arques, an artistic residency program in a small village southeast of France. One might think, in a blink, that the IFAL gallery is really full of objects, considering the extreme precision of the monumental photography covering its entire windows, photograph taken by André Morin, a well-known French exhibition photographer with whom Lainé often works. But soon, the trompe-l’oeil hypothesis disappears to be replaced by a more ambiguous  interaction with the viewer. Albeit extremely legible, thanks to its high resolution and realism, the image remains very complex. It is polluted by various phenomena happening in the space itself and that pull the image from being a simple representation, back into the field of sculpture : the reflection of the spectator, the light variations during the day, the glittering of the water in the small pond in front of the gallery. Lainé proposes that the viewer literally turn “around” the gallery, envisioning the exhibition space as an object itself.

The versatility of the production/exhibition place is affirmed as one of the essential aesthetic dynamics in Lainé’s practice, who also tries to challenge the institution and question the gallery or the art center as a public place and generator of interactions. In this way she plays with the incandescent or anecdotic, and works between the various protagonists that practice these spaces. These public interactions are affirmed by Lainé as definitively political, approaching current philosophical debates about notions as transparency, access or privacy. Revealing an anthropomorphic relation, almost amorous, to the studio, Lainé’s shattered landscapes can be imagined as relics of a crime of passion, originated by the encounter of the artist, the spectator, and art itself.

Dorothée Dupuis

Emmanuelle Lainé is a French artist born in 1973. Her work, between sculpture, photography, and installation, has been seen in France and internationally in institutions such as the 13th Biennale of Lyon (Il parait que le fond de l’être est en train de changer? 2015), the Gallery of Noisy-le-Sec (2015), the Palais of Tokyo, Paris (2014), or the Loge in Brussels (Me donnerez-vous ce qu’il faut de sang pour tremper cet acier? 2013), among others. Recent personal exhibitions include the one of the Ricard Foundation, Paris (Taking pleasure in the confusion of borders, 2014), and C-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e, Brussels (Don’t cheat me out of the fullness of my capacity!, 2015). She will be presenting a new series of works in November at the MOT International in Brussels.

Dorothée Dupuis (1980, Paris) is a French curator, author and editor residing in Mexico City, where she founded the magazine Terremoto.mx in 2013. Some of her recent projects are: Cronotopo of Mariana Castillo Deball in the MRAC Sérignan (2015); Matthieu Laurette in Parallel, Oaxaca (2014); Renaud Jerez in Lodos, Mexico D.F. (2014); In 2016 she will cure a monographic exhibition with Sophie Bueno-Boutellier in the Fondation d’Enterprise Ricard, Paris. Her texts have been published in various catalogs of exhibitions as well as in Spike, Metropolis M, Kaleidoscope, ArtReview, and Flash Art, among others.

Photos : Ramiro Chaves Courtesy of the artist. Exhibition produced with the support of the Foundation d'Entreprise Ricard, Paris, and Pernod Ricard Mexico.