Abstraction in Action Iván Navarro: Mute Parade https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/ivan-navarro-mute-parade/

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Artist: Iván Navarro

Mute Parade
October 26, 2016 – December 23, 2016
Paul Kasmin Gallery
New York, USA.

Upon entering Mute Parade, the viewer is confronted by a towering pyramid of  six drums with the words HIGH, TONE, TUNE, BASS, MUTE, and DEAF embedded in LED lights.  This monumental work, titled TUNING, 2015, produces a visual representation of sound while simultaneously removing and negating the original function of the instruments; ‘playing a song,’ in the absence of sound. In the center of the adjacent room, two freestanding drums– each six-feet in diameter– incorporate neon, LED, mirrors, and electricity to produce Navarro’s iconic infinite vanishing points. Circular texts, written in light, repeat the words KICKBACKand KNOCKNOCKNOCK in a seemingly boundless loop. The inherent silence and stillness of the artworks creates an uncanny perception of audio and movement, probing the relationship between sight and sound.

A final installation consists of four 6 x 6 foot structures that make up the Impenetrable Room (2016). This new compositional innovation co-opts the materials and format of portable “road cases,” which are customarily used to transport and protect musical instruments. Refitting the cases with mirrors and neon light, Navarro transforms these static objects into deep spaces that appear to reverberate in perpetuity. Silent and monolithic, these self-contained rooms resonate with unspoken narrative power.

Throughout the exhibition, black and white paper squares are scattered across the floors of all three galleries. The words “Read You” and “Loud Unclear,” printed on opposite sides of the cards, call attention to the disjunction between the visual and auditory aspects of communication. Informed by the aesthetics and rhythms of military parades, Mute Parade contemplates the juxtaposed feelings of celebration and intimidation that martial music begets.

 

December 12, 2016 Eduardo Costa: Acciones en la calle https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/eduardo-costa-acciones-en-la-calle/

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Artists: Vito Acconci, Artur Barrio, Rosemarie Castoro, Eduardo Costa, Cris Gianakos, Victor Grippo, Stephen Kaltenbach, Leandro Katz, Rosemary Mayer, Ana Mendieta, Marta Minujín, Hélio Oiticia, John Perreault, Regina Vater.

Acciones en la calle: Street Works in New York and Latin America circa 1970
Curator: Gillian Sneed
October 26 – December 4, 2015
Amelie A. Wallace Gallery
SUNY College
New York, NUY, USA

“Acciones en la Calle” considers the conceptual and performative strategies employed by artists in the 1960s and ’70s that rejected institutional spaces in favor of the street as the context and subject of their work. The exhibition’s point of departure is the six-part Street Works (1969-1970), a series of events during which numerous artists utilized urban public spaces in New York City’s streets as their performance and exhibition venues.

While New York is often considered the birthplace of this genre, street actions had also taken hold in Latin America, and relationships between Latin American and U.S. artists, critics, and curators developed. Latin American artists who sought exile from dictatorships or had been awarded grants came to New York, while many U.S. artists traveled to Latin America.

“Acciones en la Calle” demonstrates resonances and disjunctions between the works and their political, practical, and theoretical concerns. While the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War protests provided the backdrop against which street works emerged in the U.S., in Latin America limited art markets and repressive regimes left only the streets as venues for artistic intervention. These artists investigated the complex intersections of political repression, violence, and social marginalization in ways that challenged the traditional “center/periphery” model so often employed in canonical accounts of Latin American and U.S. conceptual art. Curator Sneed explains: “The relevance of these works could not be more urgent today, as activists across the Americas have returned to the streets to take action.”

The works in this exhibition revolve around three themes related to the urban setting: Site, Drift, and Debris. Site considers street works that mark or highlight the location where they unfolded; Drift engages works that wander through urban networks to produce dérives, or flows; and Debris explores what is revealed about a city’s inhabitants by the refuse that accumulates on their streets.

October 27, 2015 Gabriel Sierra: Numbers in a Room https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/gabriel-sierra-numbers-room/

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Artist: Gabriel Sierra

Numbers in a Room
September 20, 2015 – January 4, 2015
Sculpture Center
New York, USA

By modifying and extending the guiding information of the exhibition space, Sierra will restructure the lower level galleries, effacing and confusing distinctions between the architecture, the institution, and the works that comprise the exhibition. The combination of alternative and existing floor plans, signage, and objects in the space all refer to the codes for viewing and maneuvering through the context of an exhibition.

Increasingly layered in Sierra’s presentation, the various structures comprising an exhibition in an institution create a mirroring effect, where each thing recalls another thing. This indexical accumulation makes it unclear exactly where the exhibition begins and ends, bringing into question the semantics of the various navigational prompts within art institutions. The exhibition structure asks that the visitor adjust to its new form.

Sierra (born 1975, San Juan Nepomuceno, Colombia) is based in Bogotá, Colombia and has had solo exhibitions at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2015) and Peep-Hole in Milan (2013). Recent group exhibitions include the 56th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2013); The Ungovernables, New Museum Triennial, New Museum, New York (2012); and the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011).

October 14, 2015 Martin Pelenur: Primordial Meditations https://abstractioninaction.com/happenings/martin-pelenur-primordial-meditations/

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Artists: Claudio Vera and Martin Pelenur.

Primordial Meditations
September 17th – October 24th, 2015
Artemisa Gallery
New York, NY, USA

It is embedded in human nature to be thoughtful and innovative for survival. Collectively, a dialogue surrounding this concept is excavated from Vera’s and Pelenur’s parallel bodies of work, to raise thought provoking questions that are inherent to humanity’s progression on earth, as well as, within society. How can humanity move forward in connection with the land, and how does one’s consciousness allow this process to unfold? Such primordial concerns with existence have continued through ancient times into contemporary civilization. To investigate Vera and Pelenur in this vein brings to light the association of physical and cerebral conditions, which are key to the balancing act that humanity must perform throughout time.

Claudio Vera’s newest body of work is intensely contemporary and sensual, evolving seamlessly from his most recent series of wooden sculptures. Vera’s works on paper are created through a similar, physically intensive process of carving blocks of wood; however, instead of sculpting the artist deconstructs flat wooden surfaces and turns them into topographies, territories, physical maps, where we can wander endlessly. Vera has consciously altered his medium of choice – a conceptual reflection on deliberate transformation that exists in the structures of nature, the cosmos, and the ideas of contemporary science explored by humankind. Vera’s roots are linked to the Latin American tradition of the “School of the South,” as the artist studied for many years under one of Joaquín Torres García’s most famous pupils, Julio Alpuy. Like his teacher, Vera’s work embraces and dissolves boundaries, revealing an intimate relation between mankind and the natural world, derived from a deep understanding of organic structures and systems.Martin Pelenur’s newest body of work manifests itself through his use of paint and other synthetic mediums on paper: some forms are painted dense and heavy on the surface, thick with pigment, yet others take on fragile and crystalline structures that seem to emulate the delicate nature of inner thought. Still more, a final group of works are made with commercial packaging tape arranged in lattice form on paper. Each variation of Pelenur’s work shows a progressive creation of simple forms via the human mind. In 2006, the artist started his own self-promoted “Pelenur Scholarship,” based out of his studio Ciudad Vieja – translated as “Old City.” Pelenur’s approach to scholarship is untraditional, and his actions in doing so become an extension of his ongoing practice as an artist who explicitly devotes himself to the research of painterly materials and their collaboration with the “mental drift” that is an integral part of the evolution of society. For Pelenur, the act of painting is an experiment in thought and the inner human discourse that is methodic and repetitive when studied in depth. Even more so, perhaps his superficially manufactured scholarship is reflected in his preferred use of synthetic materials, as opposed to organic, when exploring the progressive nature of human thought.
October 2, 2015 Jaime Davidovich https://abstractioninaction.com/artists/jaime-davidovich/

My taped projects are about surfaces, context and space.

I first started working with adhesive tape in 1966. Initially I used the tape to hold my paintings to the wall, but starting in 1970 I eliminated the painting and concentrated on the tapes as my primary medium. I wanted to explore the possibilities of using spaces where the viewer does not expect art to be found. This concept brought me to intervene staircases, landing platforms and outdoor walls and objects. Each work was created for a unique space. When covering a surface, the tape creates an additive grid full of amorphous patterns caused by air bubbles. When developing a tape project, sometimes paper or a photograph was the support and framework for the piece, but many times the project was able to become monumental as it seamlessly adapted to the architecture of the space. Also in 1970, I began to incorporate videotape as part of these projects. The taped projects became “Art on tape and tapes as art”.

 
Traducido del inglés

Mis proyectos con cinta tratan sobre superficies, contexto y espacio.

Comencé trabajando con cinta adhesiva en 1966. Inicialmente utilicé cinta para sostener mis pinturas sobre la pared, pero a partir de 1970, eliminé las pinturas y me concentré en las cintas como mi medio principal. Quería explorar las posibilidades del uso de espacios en donde el espectador no espera encontrar arte. Este concepto me llevó a intervenir escaleras, plataformas de aterrizaje, paredes exteriores y objetos. Cada obra fue creada para un espacio único. Al cubrir una superficie, la cinta crea una retícula de aditivo llena de patrones amorfos causados por burbujas de aire. Durante el desarrollo de un proyecto con cinta, a veces el papel o la fotografía era el soporte y el marco de la pieza, sin embargo, muchas de las veces, el proyecto fue capaz de convertirse en monumental al momento de adaptarse perfectamente a la arquitectura del espacio. También, en 1970, comencé a incorporar cinta de video como parte de estos proyectos. Los proyectos grabados se convirtieron en “Arte en cinta y las cintas como arte”.

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May 4, 2015 Alberto Borea https://abstractioninaction.com/artists/alberto-borea/

My work is characterized by the continuous displacement and use of diverse media and materials. The openness towards these media helps me defining the development of an artistic proposal, where the object’s time and history take a fundamental importance within the plastic discourse.

I am interested in the relation between different cultures and histories, between the so-called center and its periphery.

The concepts related to ruins and progress are part of my interests as an artist.

Raised in Lima in the 80’s during the Peruvian civil war influenced my practice and my relation with the objects and their symbolism.

The position of distance about cultural, economic and social events constitute an important part in the process and execution of my projects.

I find myself attracted to the residues of civilization and in mapping and conceptualizing these materials for my work.

 

Mi trabajo se caracteriza por el uso y continuo desplazamiento de diversos medios y materiales. La apertura hacia estos medios, me ayuda a definir el desarrollo de una propuesta artística, en donde el tiempo y la historia del objeto cobran una importancia  fundamental en el discurso plástico y en su proceso.

Me interesa la  relación entre distintas culturas e historias, entre el llamado centro y la periferia. Los conceptos relacionados con la ruina y la promesa de la modernidad son algunos de los intereses conceptuales en mi práctica.

Haber vivido en Lima durante la guerra interna de los años ochenta ha influido en mi práctica como artista así como en mi relación con los objetos y sus simbolismos.

La posición de distancia ante fenómenos culturales y económicos constituye una parte importante en el proceso y en la ejecución de mis proyectos.

Estoy atraído por los residuos de la civilización y en la idea de mapear y resignificar estos objetos en mi trabajo.

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July 7, 2014