Happenings

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.

Karina Peisajovich: Background

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Artist: Karina Peisajovich

Background
April 14, 2016 – June 4, 2016
Alejandra von Hartz Gallery
Miami, Florida

Peisajovich explores the material constitution of the image more than that of representation. Whether through her environmental lighting projects as in her drawings, she alters the sensory experience of the viewer and at the same time, prompting him/her to wonder about the construction of his/her own perceptual process. In her own words “I think of visuality as an unnatural and imaginary phenomenon, fragile, contingent and constructed at the same time. From all of this are made the images in which we live”.

With their absolute formal nudity, the drawings titled “Gradient” can be seen as time encrypted in color. The palette of these works is organized based on the tension produced by chromatic relations, manifesting the unstable parameters of the eye.

“All that sinks into light is the resonance of what the night submerges” *, it is an intervention of the Gallery’s illumination system.  Peisajovich alters the existing electrical system and the disposition of the space’s lighting fixtures, changing their role and orientation.

In relation to this work, Peisajovich says: “In the latest Light Works I was more focused on using the already existing illumination systems of the premises where I was invited to show. In art spaces, especially in museums, lighting is used to impart a certain theatricality to the works. There is something of overacting in this operation. In this sense, these works disarm and absorb this setting.”

In both, the drawings and the intervention of light, appear the idea of the pictorial background, not as an inert support, but as an active space which realizes imaginary expectations. As produced by the fluctuations of the natural light in an environment, backgrounds are planes where latent forms that have not found their place are projected.

*The title of this work is taken from the film “Passion” of Jean Luc Godard.

Patrick Hamilton: Black Tools

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Artist: Patrick Hamilton

Black Tools
January 28, 2016 – May 14, 2016
The 9.99 Gallery 
Guatemala City, Guatemala

True to the conceptual nature of his work, Hamilton refers to the political history of his country through a series of collages and sculptures, which he has produced in the last year, and which broadens and deepens his aesthetic reflections on major issues affecting contemporary societies, particularly those that refer to labor and social inequality in Chile in recent years. These reflections analyze the consequences of the “neoliberal revolution” (Thomas Moulian) implemented in Chile by Pinochet — and the “Chicago School” — during the eighties and its projection in the social and cultural milieu in a post-dictatorship Chile; they result in works that can be read from the notion of “social forms” (Christian Viveros-Fauné), thanks to their economy of expressive resources and their deep bond with the analysis of social, political, and economic phenomena. Hamilton’s production could be described as realist art in relation to the exaltation of the physical qualities of his works, as well as a consideration of the concrete phenomena of our social reality.

Through the manipulation of tools used for manual labor, the artist creates objects that represent and act as metaphors in the increasingly precarious world labor economy. The formal character of the work is provided by another of Hamilton’s great source of inspiration: the History of Art. So, is the work of the constructivists, concrete art, and Suprematism — in this case Kasimir Malevich’s emblematic black square — which serves as a link between the economy of gestures and means, the use of monochrome and the formal rigor with spatulas, pikes, and sandpaper, which leave behind their functionality and remain at the mercy of anyone who wants to contemplate them.

The placement of the works in the space resembles a shadow theater, with pieces that disguise their materiality and communication function, a contradiction between the visible and invisible, transparent and opaque, opposites that in contemporary societies contribute to the concealment of problems of unemployment, shadow economies, and illegal work that become a precarious solution to the lives of millions of individuals.

Dario Escobar: Composições [Compositions]

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Artist: Dario Escobar 

Composições [Compositions]
April 6, 2016 – May 7, 2016
Casa Triângulo
São Paulo, Brazil

Dario Escobar’s artistic research develops from sculptural and installation acts started with the appropriation of industrial objects. Throughout a path of over fifteen years, the artist has already worked in dialogue with visual traditions as diverse as the Guatemalan baroque, the skin of broken cars and objects seen as symbols of consumerism. His operation as an artist happens from the selection of those pieces and their reconfiguration through actions like juxtaposition and repetition, fragmentation and cut of materials, and a reflection on how to install them inside the exhibition space.

In “Composition”, continuing this investigation, the artist presents new works in Brazil, which propose multiple possibilities of composition through the appropriation and approximation of dissimilar elements. In the series “Geometric construction” and “Modular construction”, Escobar recodes the tradition of painting the back of trucks in Guatemala, creating new patterns that invite the spectator to open them up and enjoy their distinct configurations. The formal research starting with the two-dimensional is also perceptible in his “Motor oil compositions”, in which also using a non-conventional material the artist explores the possibilities of paper and drawing.

Regarding the three-dimensional, in the series “Still-life” the artist explores ways of presenting objects from the sports industry, like basketballs, still aseptic and distant from its use by the human body. In “Balance” there is a tension of the material as well as of the elements mentioned by the artist: on one hand the metal sheets recall the minimalist sculptures of Carl Andre, on the other hand, sustaining its weight, the glass is present in the famous American glasses commercialized in Sao Paulo since 1940 and already elevated to symbols of Brazilian design.

Besides those works, in dialogue with this sculptural thought that composes through the geometry inherent to ordinary objects, there will be presented new works which will be developed through the meeting between Dario Escobar and the commodities from the popular markets in Sao Paulo. Therefore, these compositions aim to establish other direct conversations with the Brazilian visual culture, in the same way the artist replies everyday to the industrialized objects used in Guatemala.

-Raphael Fonseca

Thomas Glassford: Siphonophora

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Artist: Thomas Glassford 

Siphonophora
Until July 24, 2016
Museo Universitario del Chopo
Mexico City, Mexico

Siphonophora is a site-specific work that echoes earlier chapters in his career—above all his work on the articulation of neo-botanical structures—as well as a glossary constructed in the present. In direct allusion to the siphonophores, colonies of planktonic marine organisms with a peculiar morphology that places them between animals and plants, Glassford constructs a sculptural organism that recalls the building’s former incarnation as a natural history museum. The work combines reference points ranging from the human microbiome—the collection of microbes that colonize the body and that together comprise one hundred times more genes than in our own genome—to the classic children’s story Jack and the Beanstalk, by way of the artist’s own experiences on a farm, weaving together his extensive knowledge and love for plants, which form an important part of his everyday life.

In both the siphonophores and the microbiome, there is a social parallel with the community, the family nucleus, a neighborhood, or city. This dependency and correlation allows unity and divergence. The encounter with this complex installation fluctuates in the perception between a fossil, plant elements, or an animal organism. Depending on the viewpoint, its monumental character situates us walking on the ocean floor, entering a cave, observing from the sea surface, or seeing a climbing plant from cloud level. This ambiguity highlights the construction of parallel worlds in which viewers recognize themselves in the astonishment of a single, unrepeatable yet collective reflection.