Artist: Jose Dávila

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.

• Happenings

Artists: Fariba Abedin, Adela Andea, Soledad Arias and Lorraine Tady.

The Weight of Light
December 5, 2015- January 2, 2016
Rudolph Blume Fine Art / ArtScan Gallery
Houston, TX, USA

The visible light spectrum is quite dramatic and holds all the colors that humans can see; a beam of white light is made up of all the colors. Visible light is composed of photons, which are the most abundant particles in the universe. These weight-less particles have the ability to form a stream or wave-like pattern that makes up the wavelengths of the Electromagnetic Spectrum. Contrast of hue, in painting, enables the painter to establish the interplay of luminous forces. Black and white are the artist’s strongest tools to express darkness and light, but with the advancement in harnessing different light particles, neon and LED lights are new and exciting instruments.This exhibition explores and juxtaposes the visual parameters of light as a physical presence and asa symbolic conjecture.

Soledad Arias’ work has been exhibited extensively in museums throughout the US and South America. Her wall based neon sculptures engage the viewer with mostly trivial, yet emotionally charged words like “white lies” or “like you i forgot”. The impact of the brilliant luminescence and the halo effect of the neon writing potentially transforms the immanence and perception of these phrases.

• Happenings

Artists: Esvin Alarcón Lam, Ricardo Alcaide, Darío Escobar, Gianfranco Foschino, Juan Fernando Herrán, Harold Mendez, Gabriel de la Mora, Ronny Quevedo, and Ana Maria Tavares.

Líneas de la Mano
May 12 – July 3, 2015
Sicardi Gallery
Houston, TX, USA

Featuring artists from Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Venezuela, Líneas de la mano (lines of the hand, lifelines) takes as its premise the idea that geometries connect the quotidian moments of our daily lives. Indeed, a line connects two points, A and B, start and finish, end and beginning; lines are defined by this function of connection, even as they continue to move past the points they connect

The artists in the exhibition use the languages and conceptual frameworks of modernism and abstraction to suggest poetic connections: between people, between historical referents, between political experiences, and between places. The line as connector becomes a way of skillfully addressing fraught histories, and of weaving a set of relationships. Líneas de la mano also considers the tactility of each object. The works exhibited demonstrate a strong relationship to materials and their histories, from the scrap metal of Guatemalan buses, to the thick, sooty texture of an archival photograph transferred to aluminum, to the fabric retrieved from vintage radio speakers.

The exhibition title playfully alludes to palmistry; the connection is meant to highlight the actions of the hand, implicit in the creation of the work. Astrologer, numerologist, clairvoyant, and palm-reader Cheiro (William John Warner, 1866-1936) writes, “the hand… denotes the change going on in the brain, even years before the action of the individual becomes the result of such a change.”  Read in a different context, it is a compelling statement about the artistic process.

• Happenings

Artist: Pedro Tyler

Extensa
March 24 – May 2, 2015
Sicardi Gallery
Houston, TX, USA

Pedro Tyler transforms metal rulers into installations that connect the sculptural object with the history of philosophy. The exhibition opens with a reception on Tuesday, March 24, from 6-8 pm with the artist.

Tyler looks to the intersections of philosophy and religion, sculpture and knowledge. “Extensa has to do with the idea of immensity,” he writes. With his installation Principio y Fin (Beginning and End), Tyler bends sections of metal measuring tapes, turning them into the symbol for infinity. Connecting each piece, the linked chain emerges from the wall and splits into several strands, which connect to the ceiling.

The installation and sculptures in Extensa continue the artist’s ongoing investigation of systems of measurement as metaphors for the immensity of the universe. The artist writes, “Making sculpture is providing matter with form, organizing the space in which we move. How then to make an inanimate body transmit thought and emotion? According to Descartes, body and thought are quite distinct. He maintains that there are only two things: the extended thing (bodies, measurable space) and the thinking thing (the immaterial, thoughts, ideas and intuition). And inside the thinking is perfection and infinity, that is, God. But if each body is infinite within itself, are we not saying, like Spinoza, that God is in everything?”

Image: Pedro Tyler, “Beginning and End”, 2014, Variable dimensions.

• Happenings

Artists: Carlos Aires, Mark Hogensen, Leigh Anne Lester, Rigoberto Luna, Francisco Merel, Ann-Michele Morales, Ricardo Rendón, Ansen Seale, Xochi Solis, and Jason Villegas.

Flatland
July 11 – October 11, 2014
Curated by Patty Ortiz
Museo Guadalupe
San Antonio, TX, USA

In a time of globalization, transcultural movement and the leveling of world commerce, economists believe that today the earth could be perceived as becoming flat. They have used this metaphor to describe the world economy. This condition can also be utilized in describing transcultural movement. With the ease of cross migration, cultures are continuing to collide at a more rapid rate. The globalization of culture, ideas and artistic practice is creating a new balance, interface and flat playing field.  Artists further the notion of “flatness” by the appropriation of popular imagery from their own and other cultures. The exponential growth of digital communication has accelerated this process. The universal presence of the actual flat screen monitor has brought about a flat screen mentality. Yet artists are able to juggle their ethnicity, cultural experience and global views to create works that are multilayered and distinct. The presenting artists of FLATLAND are at the intersection of cultural form, process and meaning in this emerging flat world.

Images: Installation view, courtesy of the artist.

• Happenings