Happenings

día a día / day by day
November  2013 – January 2014
The 9.99 Gallery
Guatemala City, Guatemala

The artist’s day by day develops in the studio, a space that serves as a laboratory of ideas. Just as the everyday governs most people’s lives—the teacher teaches every day or the doctor sees patients week after week—it also tends to provide a daily routine for the artist, allowing a pattern of reflection and research that leads to the creation of works of art based on his observation of the political, social, and cultural life of a city or country.

Day by Day is the fourth exhibition The 9.99 presents this year, bringing together six international artists: Patrick Hamilton and Sebastián Preece (Chile), Andrea Aragón, Darío Escobar and Aníbal López (A1-53167) (Guatemala) and Nery Gabriel Lemus (United States), all artists whose work tends to reflect the everyday of our lives.

Working in Santiago, Chile, Hamilton and Preece represent the new generation of artists from this South American country; both use everyday objects to map aspects of the city where they live. Hamilton’s elegant minimalist geometric forms made with sharp cutting razor wire, Composición con diamantes (Composition with diamonds, 2011), and pieces created with tools, Serrucho (Hand saw, 2013), speak of the social insecurity that forms in a country where recent economic wealth has not been distributed evenly. The decay of infrastructure in certain city neighborhoods is present in Volumen XIV (Volume XIV) and Volumen XVI (Volume XVI, both 2008) by Preece. The truncated history of everyday life is buried in the ruins that survive time, in the books that daily disintegrate into dust.

A daily routine involves facilitating the existence of human beings, but the work of Guatemalans Andrea Aragón, Darío Escobar and Aníbal López (A1 -53 167) evidence otherwise. Escobar has a group of paintings, which at first glance shows an abstract composition on a supposedly perfect sheet of white paper; under closer scrutiny one can see that the artist has torn the sheet in two. Dibujo interrumpido No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3 (Interrupted drawing No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3, all 2013) represent a fractured society that tries to remedy injustices and historical errors with cosmetic fixes, but these breaks remain always there, even if difficult to see with the naked eye. The poignant photographs of Aragón, capture reality as it is, and it is often tough. Images De la serie “antipostales” (From the series “antipostcards,” 2001) and De la serie “Ghetto” (From the series “Ghetto,” 2010) sadly delve into what everyday life can be for people who live in a dilapidated house, with scruffy furniture and graffiti on the walls, or in those terrible and impersonal modern buildings that instead of making life more enjoyable make it an earthly hell. Listón de plástico negro de 250 mts. de largo x 4 mts. de ancho colgado sobre el puente del Incienso (Black plastic strip of 250 meters. long x 4 mts. wide hanging over the Incienso Bridge, 2003) by López (A1 -53 167) captures for posterity the grief that people express when the constitutional laws of the country are broken. The documentation of this action adds to the rich artistic and historical file that the artist has been building since the beginning of his career.

Nery Gabriel Lemus is a foreigner who should not be. The son of Guatemalan immigrants living in the United States, Lemus has developed his career in Los Angeles, California, which focuses on many of the tensions that routinely affect people in his condition. His foreign status gives him an objective distance that makes his observations not only very keen but are also permeated by nostalgia about what is not known but is sensed. De Guatemala a guatepeor (From Guatebad to guateworst, 2013) Lemus resists stigmatizing a country that has suffered daily violence while improvement and progress are also being achieved.

In Day by Day, artists seem to agree that not all is bad, nor all good, and that this constantly changing, precarious balance upholds the survival of mankind and is one in which the artist finds inspiration for his creative activities.

-Alma Ruiz F.

Emilio Chapela: Requiem
July 10, 2013 –  January 5, 2014
Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros
Mexico City, Mexico

In Requiem, Emilio Chapela restructured the system of organization in the library of David Alfaro Siqueiros and treats this replica as a new strategy to navigate the muralist’s collection. Revealing of his worldview is the fact that Siqueiros organized over 2,000 books in three main categories: Art, Politics and Others. Considering this classification as an entry point, Emilio studied the library and pointed to the contrasts in terms of content, hidden by the previous system.

Maintaining the original categories, Chapela created exact copies of all the books in wood. Respectively, the colors red, blue and yellow located on the spine of each book represent Art, Politics and Others. Although Siqueiros only read Spanish, English and French, his library contains texts in Russian, Japanese, Greek, Chinese, English, Italian and German. In the replica, these are shown with other colors, the duplicate allowing for further interpretaions of Siqueiros’ political standpoint. For example, Vladimir Ilich Lenin through Photography (1969) is a first edition published in Russian in the Soviet Union in the Politics category that presents a visual analysis on Lenin.

For Chapela, Requiem can be appreciated as a funeral procession that refers to the library’s conceptualization and the present-future of the book. Throughout his research, the artist recovered “scan errors” discarded by the Siqueiros Researcher, during the digitalization process of the library that began in 2010. Alluding to the current state of the collection, Chapela reinterpreted these as photographs. Lastly, Chapela included a handout of a page of another Russian book, pointing to the act of possession and the configuration of a personal collection.

Emilio Chapela lives and works both in Mexico City and the Forgotten Realms of the Earth.  He works with the latest technology from Japan and China. His artistic practice is concerned with the development of a system that allows the operator to control various processes such as those used for conventional and unconventional methods to determine the relative importance of individualized factors. He also investigates the effect of increasing importance of the different methods used to identify the specific factors involved in the production and dissemination of a particular type of information. In such a way, he has worked with several different methods to determine how the various systems respond to the needs identified through their own resources. He has participated in shows both at galleries, museums and other cultural institutions, at places like the U.S. Geological Society of America and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was awarded with the prestigiou award for gallantry in the field of public procurement and disposal. In 2010, he published his first book on the history of the world. In the near future, he will be showing his work at the National Institute of Technology and Information Ethics in Washington DC.

*This artist statement has been generated by a computer.

Click here to view Emilio Chapela on Abstraction in Action.

Mauro Giaconi: Ocupación
November 23, 2013 – February 2014
Casa Vecina
Mexico City, Mexico

“Y hay aquel pasaje en su novela donde los presos hacían fila ante una ventanilla. Sólo veían sus espaldas, pero en sus espaldas había de todo: alegría, miedo, esperanza, desesperación. Lasespaldas son rostro”.

Emmanuel Levinas.

Ocupación es una intervención en sitio específico del artista de origen argentino Mauro Giaconi, para el programa Fuera de sala de Casa Vecina. El trabajo de Giaconi deambula entre el campo de la escultura y la instalación, siendo la práctica del dibujo su territorio de producción actual con el cual genera espacios provocadores en donde el caos cobra una dimensión espectacular. Para el artista, el trabajo en espacios arquitectónicos le brinda la oportunidad para abrir reflexiones puntuales sobre algunos de sus principales intereses filosóficos e investigaciones artísticas: el encierro físico y de pensamiento que implican a su vez, un continuum de vigilia permanente, y que contrapone continuamente al concepto de “libertad”. En este sentido, el proyecto parte de la resignificación que el propio artista hace de la acción de “ocupar” físicamente un lugar, entendiéndola incluso como una actitud política de resistencia. Es así como la imposibilidad del encierro se impone a manera de prisión, celda o jaula a través de los muros, vidrios y puertas de la sala de lectura saturadas-desdibujadas de grafito, mismas que servirán como marco para la realización de una acción dentro del espacio el día de su apertura.

Mauro Giaconi (Bs As, Argentina; 1977). Ha participado en exposiciones colectivas e individuales en Latinoamérica, Estados Unidos y Europa. Estudió el Profesorado de Pintura en la Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón. Fue becario del C.I.A. (Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas) y del S.I.T.A.C. (Simposio Internacional de Teoría y Arte Contemporáneo) y participó en las residencias Bemis Center for Contemporary Art ySkowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Desde el año 2011, vive y trabaja en la Ciudad de México.

Click here to view Mauro Giaconi on Abstraction in Action.

Danilo Dueñas: Art Kabinett at Art Basel Miami Beach
December 5 to 8, 2013

Galerie Thomas Schulte
Art Basel Miami Beach
Booth C18
Miami, FL, USA

Danilo Dueñas composes his constructive paintings by assembling found, often discarded materials and intervening, when necessary, with paint, without limiting himself to a given format. He explores the surfaces and transforms them by suppressing or adding color, by sanding them down or by adding collage elements. For the Art Kabinett, Danilo Dueñas presents a selection of new works in different media, such as collages and works on paper.

Click here to view Danilo Dueñas on Abstraction in Action.

Bruno Dubner, Untitled, 2012, gelatin silver print without camera, size variable

Never Underestimate a Monochrome

The University of Iowa Museum
September 30, 2012 – January 31, 2013

The Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art
February 1 – March 2, 2013

Meant to activate the poetic, political and performative registers of the monochrome, Never Underestimate a Monochrome (2012) is a conceptual project conceived and organized by Mariángeles Soto-Díaz in a collaborative partnership with the University of Iowa Museum of Art. Artists from different parts of the world interpreted instructions written by Soto-Díaz, and provided documentation of their monochrome performance for a digital archival space, bringing the textual, embodied and mediated aspects of the monochrome into dialogue. The collective event occurred over the summer of 2012 across the globe, defying the logic of the event as necessarily bound to a singular physical and temporal space.

Without heroic gestures but always paradoxical: the monochrome has been accused of being threatening, and not threatening enough—joke and elegy of modernism. In its most radical gesture, the monochrome asks the questions pertaining not just to the material constitution of painting, but to the territory of its limits, potentially dematerializing the notion of painting altogether. It is as if the monochrome insists on asking: Is this enough to constitute a painting?

It is the monochrome’s dual physical and textual presence that tests the commitment of looking. Always energized through its cyclic return, the monochrome performs as alternately easy, impenetrable, fake, mute, sublime, honest, and even boring in its simplicity. It is perhaps this performative versatility that has allowed the monochrome to be able (and willing) to return.

In Never Underestimate a Monochrome, I create a role for the monochrome’s resourceful disposition by setting up performative functions designed to connect the artists. The monochrome, here a material manifestation of instructions, is also a connecting node for each of the participants. The instructions allow artists to focus on the gesture of connection folded into the making process. Convening these works together reveals discrepancies and parallels between artists’ interpretations of the instructions, which from the start embrace the promise of a connective thread between monochrome works, artists, past and future.

Participating artists:
David Batchelor (Scotland/UK), Emilio Chapela (Mexico), Jason Corder (Kenya), Jaime Davidovich (Argentina), Bruno Dubner (Argentina), Maria Jose Duran (Chile/USA), Anoka Faruqee (USA), Stacy Fisher (USA), Ken Friedman (Australia), Babak Golkar (Canada), Michelle Grabner (USA), Billy Gruner / Sarah Keighery (Australia), Brent Hallard (Japan/USA), Beth Harland (UK), Lynne Harlow (USA), Sue Hettmansperger (USA), Odili Odita (Nigeria), Naoshi Okura (Japan/Sweden), Karina Peisajovich (Argentina), Pineapple Park (Australia), Dai Roberts (UK), Huseyin Sami (Australia), Lizi Sanchez (Peru/UK), Claudia Sbrissa (Canada/Italy/USA), Suzanne Stroebe (USA), Hadi Tabatabai (Iran/USA), Sherwin Tibayan (Philippines/USA), Douglas Witmer (USA), Horacio Zabala (Argentina), Patricia Zarate (Colombia/USA)

http://www.neverunderestimateamonochrome.org