Happenings

Artist: Gabriel Sierra

el título de la exposición cambia a cada hora
May 3 – June 28, 2015
The Renaissance Society
University of Chicago
Chicago, IL, USA

His project consists of a group of constructions to stand in or to walk over, which relate abstractly to the idea of inhabiting different moments of space and time. The exhibition features a cyclical title that changes hourly:

10:00 am    Monday Impressions. 

11:00 am    How the Outside Leaks into the Room.

12:00 ­pm    Smells Like 100 Years Old.

1:00 pm     The Room Is in My Eye. The Space under My Body.

2:00 pm     In the Meantime, (This Place Will Be Empty after 5:00 pm).

3:00 pm     An Actual Location for This Moment.

4:00 pm     Few Will Leave Their Place to Come Here for Some Minutes. 

5:00 pm     Did You Know Who Built Your House? 

Sierra is intrigued by the language of man-made objects and the dimensions of the spaces in which we live, work, and think. His practice employs a variety of techniques – from sculpture and spatial interventions to performance and texts – to examine how the human body functions in relation to its environment. Trained in architecture and design, and drawing on the history of Latin American Modernism, Sierra connects the perception of forms and materials to the construction of language, communication, and knowledge.

Sierra’s installation at the Renaissance Society features materials (for example, wood, stones, and plant matter) that have been isolated from their usual geographic situations, processed and domesticated for the context of the exhibition. By inviting visitors to walk over and among the constructions with no determined path, the artist sets up a series of areas that refer to the transitional space of the antechamber. They are not destinations in themselves, but passages of experience leading from one to another, momentary neutral zones.

The exhibition’s title will change every hour to frame the specific moment in which the visitor experiences the work. Like the various constructions Sierra offers, this shifting title experiments with the ways in which environments, and the exhibition in particular, are perceived across time.

An exhibition catalogue featuring essays by Douglas Fogle and Irene V. Small and documentation of the installation is forthcoming.

Gabriel Sierra (born 1975, San Juan Nepomuceno, Colombia) lives and works in Bogotá. Recent solo exhibitions include ggaabbrriieellssiieerrrraa at Kurimanzutto, Mexico City, Mexico (2013) and Thus Far at Peephole, Milan, Italy (2013). His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Do Objeto para o Mundo, COLEÇÃO INHOTIM, Itaú Cultutal, São Paulo (2015),Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative: Latin America, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014), Impulse, Reason, Sense, Conflict at Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami (2014) and The 2013 Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2013).

Artists: Angela Ferreira, Arnaldo Antunes, Catarina Botelho, Chelpa Ferro, Chiara Banfi, Gabriela Albegaria, Guto Lacaz, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Maimuna Adam, Mauro Pinto, O Grivo, and Susana Gaudêncio.

As Margens dos Mares
May 8 – August 2, 2015
Sesc Pinheiros
Sao Paulo, Brazil

Com curadoria de Agnaldo Farias, a mostra reúne doze artistas de Angola, Brasil, Moçambique e Portugal, a fim de apresentar uma parcela da produção contemporânea destes países lusófonos. Os trabalhos apresentam interseções entre as artes visuais e a música, refletem sobre questões como memória, espaço e arquitetura por meio de instalações, fotografias, vídeos e objetos.

Um encontro entre artistas expoentes de Angola, Brasil, Cabo Verde, Guiné-Bissau, Moçambique e Portugal que busca apresentar por meio das artes visuais e da música uma expressão da cultura contemporânea destes países lusófonos: este é o horizonte de “As Margens dos Mares”, projeto que ocorre no Sesc Pinheiros entre 8 de maio e 2 de agosto com curadoria do crítico de arte e professor da FAU-USP Agnaldo Farias e direção musical do guitarrista, compositor e produtor norte-americano Lee Ritenour.

Realizada pelo Sesc e idealizada pela Sociedade Cultural Arte Brasil, a iniciativa reunirá uma exposição com obras de doze artistas que refletem sobre questões como memória, espaço e arquitetura a partir de instalações, fotografias, vídeos e objetos, além de encontros musicais inéditos com a presença de músicos dos países convidados. “A diluição dos contornos rígidos que, um dia, estabeleceram fronteiras entre linguagens artísticas expandiu caminhos para criadores. Imagens, sons, toques, cheiros e gostos hoje se misturam em composições sinestésicas que proporcionam reflexões sobre inquietações contemporâneas – esta profusão de experiências sensíveis constitui a linha mestra d’As Margens dos Mares”, explica o diretor regional do Sesc São Paulo, Danilo Santos de Miranda. “O projeto nasceu de uma música aparentada às jam sessions jazzísticas, nas quais instrumentistas de origens diversas entram em sintonia pela linguagem dos sons, timbres e ritmos”, conta Carmen Ritenour, diretora-fundadora da Sociedade Cultural Arte Brasil. “Suas marcas são a colaboração entre artistas consagrados e a oferta de diversas manifestações criativas ao público”, completa a diretora geral da iniciativa. ARTES VISUAIS.

A exposição, localizada no segundo andar do Sesc Pinheiros, contará com obras de Arnaldo Antunes, Guto Lacaz, Chelpa Ferro, Chiara Banfi e O Grivo (Brasil); Ângela Ferreira, Maimuna Adam e Mauro Pinto (Moçambique); Catarina Botelho, Gabriela Albergaria e Susana Gaudêncio (Portugal) e Kiluanji Kia Henda (Angola). “As instalações predominam e a música, incluindo ruídos, atua como elemento agregador da exposição, atravessando-a de ponta a ponta”, define o curador Agnaldo Farias, cujo trabalho é voltado ao rompimento das barreiras entre linguagens artísticas.

Ações educativas e programação integrada com debates, oficinas, intervenções e exibições de filmes enriquecem o período expositivo, de 8 de maio a 2 de agosto. Para o curador da exposição, Agnaldo Faria a mostra é um diálogo sinestésico. “São 12 trabalhos artísticos de Angola, Brasil, Moçambique e Portugal, que interagem no espaço de ‘As Margens dos Mares’. As instalações predominam, e a música, incluindo ruídos, atua como elemento agregador da exposição, atravessando-a de ponta a ponta”, define o curador que busca por obras que nascem do rompimento das barreiras entre linguagens artísticas. A noção de sinestesia e o estímulo de mais de um sentido norteou as escolhas da curadoria.

Artists: Magdalena Atria, Ricardo Rendón, Mariángeles Soto-Díaz, Rubén Ortiz Torres, and Antonio Muñiz.

Multifarious Abstraction
Curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill
June 20 – July 25, 2015
Fabien Castanier Gallery
Culver City, CA, USA

Multifarious Abstraction is an exhibition that questions traditional understanding of the nature of abstraction as a modern field separate from reality. The five artists participating in Multifarious Abstraction present conceptually challenging, loaded and sometimes political explorations of abstract vocabularies in art, which point to unique ways to experience and think on contemporary culture. The five artists are from Latin America, where the division between high and low culture is not as central or as marked as in The United States and Europe. The abstraction proposed here moves away from modernist utopian ideals and pure aesthetics, to dialogue with industrial and popular culture, daily life, inner struggle, politics and gender.

Magdalena Atria is exhibiting free abstract compositions entirely made with plasticine. The artist, who has developed an extensive oeuvre with this material, addresses painting through a material which is malleable, fragile, common and familiar, to produce slowly complicated surfaces that embody “tension between the rational and the emotional, between the personal and the collective, between the existential and the banal, the formal and the symbolic.” Atria attempts to connect the ideal, manifested through abstraction, with the daily and existential dimensions of concrete reality.

Antonio Muñiz is an artist who explores by an intuitive method ways to free the mind and perception from predetermined responses. He employs fumage, a technique for producing organic forms with a burning candle at varying angles and distance from the canvas, thus creating an uncontrolled compositional structure. Muñiz pursues the “gray area”, a multidimensional space that is both symbolic and psychological and deconstructs conditioning dualities such as black/white, outsider/insider, and right/wrong. The artist states: “The gray area is a non-judgmental, non-linear space where we allow ourselves to interact with our environment, breaking free of duality and of conditioned responses.”

Ricardo Rendón’s work is informed by his interest in traditional trades and materials, which are for the artist places of “creative learning”. He states: “My work is presented as a system of questioning of the creative practice, of the execution, productive realization and notion of work.” His mediums range from industrial materials, to sand paper, felt and leather; and his techniques from perforating, cutting, nailing, grinding, sanding, gluing, to welding. For Multifarious Abstraction, the artist exhibits work from the two series: Work Area and Lighting Circuits, with materials such as copper and industrial felt. He transforms a plumber’s purposeful and precise procedure for joining copper tubes into the method for creating free standing sculptures which reflect both on traditional knowledge and on contemporary art’s expansive possibilities.

Mariángeles Soto-Díaz uses the language of abstraction as a way to materialize and connect ideas. Her work explores critically the legacies of modernism, echoing the particular modern historical traditions of Venezuela in dialogue with modernity and abstraction in contemporary culture. For this exhibition she will be showing the site-specific installation The Pink Elephant in the Room, to insert into the White Cube the discussion of gender and racial inequality in the art world. As the artist explains: “The Pink Elephant in the Room addresses the ‘invisibility’ of these issues through indulging in the color pink as a feminist statement while also re-signifying upon the language of abstract painting.”

Rubén Ortiz-Torres is a multidisciplinary artist who goes back to the late 1980s. His work, whether it be photographs, paintings, movies or sculptures, is informed by a hybrid and original combination of popular and mass culture. One of the key references in his work is the low rider and car industry cultures. In his recent work, he experiments with the auto industry’s most recent advances in car paint. For example, his piece Womb Envy (2014), is made with urethane and thermochromic paint and high-density foam. This orange piece in the shape of a pregnant tummy, when touched with your fingers, becomes marked temporarily in yellow on the work’s surface. His black Mexican and American flags made with urethane and chromo-luminescent paint, exhibited in the show, refer on the one hand to modern issues of anarchist ideology, and on the other, to how these national symbols, especially in the context of recent events in Mexico and the USA (The Baltimore riots), may allow the political minority standpoints in contemporary society to be embodied.

Cecilia Fajardo-Hill is a British/Venezuelan art historian and curator. Fajardo-Hill specializes in modern and contemporary art with a focus in Latin American art. She has a PhD in Art History from the University of Essex, England, and an MA in 20th Century Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, England. From 2005- 2008, Fajardo-Hill served as Director and Chief Curator for CIFO and the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, and from 2009-2012 served as Chief Curator at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Long Beach, CA. Presently, Fajardo-Hill is guest curator at the Hammer Museum, the Chief Curator of the Sayago & Pardon Collection and Abstraction in Action, and a visiting scholar at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. She is currently based in Los Angeles, CA.

Artists: Jenny Patricia Ariza, Jonathan Blanco, Nicolás Cadavid, Jennifer Cristancho, María Angélica Martínez, Rafael Prada, Rafael Valenzuela, Luis Carlos Reyes, Freddy Saúl Serrano, and Rossely Ramírez Villamizar.

Remembranza
Curated by Plegable Colectivo (Barbarita Cardozo y Laura Lucia Serrano)
May 8-29, 2015
Centro Cultural del Oriente
Bucaramanga, Colombia

Remembranza” es la segunda curaduría de Plegable Colectivo en donde el tema de interés gira en torno a la naturaleza, ésta vez, desde proyectos de artistas emergentes y jóvenes de Santander, que al apuntar a tan amplía variedad de connotaciones de tipo simbólico, conceptual, cultural o histórico, abren un espectro a las diferentes formas en las que nos relacionamos con ella.

Los recorridos mentales y de desplazamiento presentes en la mayoría de las piezas denotan la necesidad del ser humano por contemplar, estudiar, representar, registrar o apropiar la naturaleza.

Artists: Carlos Bissolino, Carlos Baragli, Daniel Callori, Julián León Camargo, Juan Giribaldi, Guido Ignatti, Julim Rosa, Leo Ocello, Luis Ortega, Sofi Quirno, Alejandro Taliano, and Natasha Voliakovsky.

Bonzo
May 16, 2015
Casa Uno
Buenos Aires, Argentina

Bonzo es un proyecto artístico que, gracias al apoyo de Metro Building, se aloja temporalmente en casas que serán demolidas, con el fin de establecer talleres de artistas y generar proyectos autónomos de investigación y experimentación en un tiempo denido por el propio lugar.

Las casas, ya deshabitadas y a la espera de su demolición, serán laboratorio de diversas experiencias. Cada casa albergará una propuesta determinada, y cada propuesta artistas, talleres e hipótesis de trabajo durante el tiempo en que esa casa espera para ser otra cosa.

Bonzo es cada una de las casas y todas a la vez. Cada espacio tendrá autonomía funcional y a su vez formará parte del proyecto total. Cada casa tendrá un núcleo creativo fuerte que será integrado por aquellos que quieran desarrollar un asunto en esa situación determinada, y que podrá incluir a los artistas responsables, a curadores y a invitados especiales que puedan potenciar la propuesta.

El ciclo de trabajo será entre cinco y ocho meses para los artistas que usen las instalaciones como taller/laboratorio y se evaluará cada caso particular en los artistas que propongan una muestra o acción especíca. Antes de la demolición, se harán al menos dos aperturas de cada casa con el fin de mostrar las producciones nales, así como también las que estén en proceso, tanto de los artistas en situación de taller como de los invitados especiales.

Cada nueva casa construida sobre un bonzo tendrá un espacio destinado a mencionar el proyecto que ahí se integró y a los artistas que lo compusieron, enlazando las etapas de la casa, como una transformación del espacio y como una memoria de lo sucedido.

Dependiendo de la propuesta de cada artista, algunos fragmentos u obras completas podrán resguardarse para formar parte del patrimonio del nuevo edificio.

Proyecto curaduría y gestión: Carlos Baragli, Juan Giribaldi y Guido Ignatti.