Happenings provides references on art events, exhibitions, biennales, art fairs and festivals, with a focus on Abstraction in Action artists and post-90s abstraction from Latin America.
Gabriel de la Mora: Sound Inscriptions on Fabric
July 15, 2016 – September 2, 2016 The Drawing Center
New York, NY
Gabriel de la Mora is best known for constructing visual works from found, discarded, and obsolete objects, such as eggshells and shoe soles. De la Mora describes these objects, which have outlived their usefulness, as caches for historical information about everyday life. In his exhibition at The Drawing Center, De la Mora will present an installation of fifty-five pairs of found speaker screens. Each screen is imprinted with an inscription created by the dust and air that circulated through the speaker during its life, recording the cadence of countless voices, advertisements, news broadcasts, soap operas, football games, and music, as well as noise, interference, and silence.
The Elephant and the Feather
May 6, 2016 – September 4, 2016 Marfa Contemporary Curated by Dr. Natalie Maria Roncone
Marfa, Texas
Introducing a particular interest in Western culture, the imagery comprised within the artist’s work is based on a deep approach to architecture and art history. This allows him to create tautological games regarding the legacy of the 20th century avant-gardes. Recently, the artist has explored photography and documents as a means of registration, and their possibilities of resignification. These media lets him to appeal to the imagination and generate new perspectives on artistic tradition.
In the same vein, Dávila has recently developed a series of sculptures whose structural work is based on the arrangement and overlapping of material elements such as boulders, glass and marble, kept in balance with industrial ratchet straps. The functional articulation of these materials is a comment on the historical distance between different artistic practices.
Davila’s work addresses the question about the limits of instrumental values through the use of common materials to create sculptures, objects and installation. Frequently, the nature of these materials approaches both, architecture construction as well as formal artistic production, which subscribe his work to principles coined by Minimalism and Arte Povera. Dávila has also manifested a special interest in the use and occupation of space, issues that have been present throughout his career.
“…certain types of perception of the world are poetic themselves. Everything that helps to dissolve the boundaries, making the world a homogeneous and poorly differentiated whole, is impregnated with poetic power (is the case of fog or twilight). Some objects have poetic impact, not as objects alone, but by breaking the delimitation of space and time with their mere presence, they induce a special psychological state. Poetry is not just another language; it’s a whole new beholding. One way to see the world, all objects in the world (both highways and serpents, flowers and parking lots).”1
“… There is a dual operation at work, the desire to recreate a historical piece, on one hand, and to reinterpret geometric abstraction on the other. This dual intent is characteristic of the works Azar has made in recent years, accomplishing a strange association of scale and mood, a peculiar combination of figuration and abstraction, the coexistence of diverse temporalities: we see in them the image of something that once was coupled with new ways presented as a viable artistic path, today.” 2
“An image is an act, not a thing.” 3
“Using modernity as a catapult, as starting point for exploring new landscapes. Scrape the golden aura of modern practice, taking it closer to the imperfection of real societies to expose the corrosive air of today, to loosen the rust of the past and adapt to local hybrids. There is a new facade that makes use of the foundations planted in the quicksands of the tropic, where everything is malleable and voluptuous. An artistic act becomes transcendental when it crosses several layers of reality through its core, that’s when art, sharing the same room with the social and the political, becomes a historical event. Abstraction builds a bridge to a world of ideas, built with ropes and lumber, where some steps are missing and others are loose or hanging. There is a musical curiosity in all creative processes, intuitive and poetic where we approach to Vanguardism as an extension of tyranny.” 4
1 Intervention 2, Michel Houellebecq, Flamitron, 2009.
2 El camino a la Semilla, Alejandra Aguado, 2015.
3 Jean Paul Sartre
4 Amadeo Azar
Building on the investigations of the material manifestations of human perspective and information systems that Chapela introduced in his 2014 exhibition at the gallery, No Pain, No Brain focuses specifically on the intellectual and physical environments of the Bell Labs complex during its 90-year history. As the premises were recently sold to Nokia and some buildings are on the verge of being converted into a “mixed-use lifestyle complex”, Chapela took on the role of archeologist and anthropologist as he explored the grounds and uncovered its vestiges: abandoned but yet stuck in time, as if the scientists would return at any moment to resume their experiments. The Do Not Erase series offers a tribute to the anonymous scientists whose musings remain un-erased on whiteboards inside the Laboratories’ buildings. Saved from the fate of demolition, these whiteboards preserve for posterity the ‘famous last words’ and calculations of some of these scientists, some of which include “No Pain, No Brain” and “Frieder Mach’s Gut!” As Ken Farmer writes in the exhibition text, “Appropriation and direct representation creates the space for abstract reflection and poetic speculation.” Re-contextualized in the gallery, these whiteboards offer glimpses into sets of knowledge and potentialities to which the public was not privy until now.
Other works also speak to Chapela’s interest in opening up the boundaries of knowledge in light of the on-going technological boom. Bell Nobel Prizes (2016) presents the brains of the eight Nobel Prize-winning scientists that worked at Bell Labs. The brains here are made of silicon, “an atomic relative of the carbon that comprises our own brains and the key ingredient in the computer chips that power society today”, and continue the speculation started by early science fiction writers of whether it too could be a life-generating and sustaining element. The sculptural series Semi-transistors (2016) also uses silicon as a base, this time for amplifying an electrical current, and pays homage to the first transistors that were created at Bell Labs in 1947. In the midst of the surge of artificial intelligence and machine learning, these works acknowledge the present issues brought forth by the machine’s challenge to the singular power of the human mind.
