Nina Menocal Gallery at PULSE Miami 2010

Foto

NINA MENOCAL GALLERY AT PULSE MIAMI 2010
PULSE Miami will return to the Ice Palace December 2 - 5, 2010
 
From: Thursday, December 2, 2010
Until: Sunday, December 5, 2010
 
PULSE MIAMI. CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR
Ice Palace
1400 North Miami Ave.
Miami, FL 33136
Web: www.pulse-art.com
 
NINA MENOCAL GALLERY
Zacatecas 93, Colonia Roma
México DF, 06700
Phone: + 52(55) 5564 7209 ext. 101
Fax: + 52(55) 5574 7486
Email: galeria@ninamenocal.com
Web: www.ninamenocal.com
 
PULSE MIAMI. CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR
NINA MENOCAL GALLERY
BOOTH B-203
 
Artist:
Carlos Aguirre // Duvier del Dago // Ángel Delgado // Humberto Díaz // Atelier Morales // Sandra Ramos

 
The overarching concept uniting the works:

All the pieces on show use industrialized materials to present a discourse on violence: the violence of confinement, the violence of the global economic and sociopolitical landscape, the violence of natural phenomena and the violence hidden in the human face.

Carlos Aguirre
The images shaping these works were extracted from a photographic archive of the first shots taken of detainees before legal proceedings are begun. With this group of front-facing photos, Aguirre has created a series of portraits that interweave the different faces and expressions of astonishment, sadness and anxiety arising from the possibility of being locked up. In order to break up the rigidity that can typify portraits, the artist brings into play a variety of textures, mounting methods, techniques and materials. The photographs are reconfigured into portraits printed on special paper, on light boxes, or transformed via waterjet etching, all of which cause the figure to become distorted over time.

Ángel Delgado
In his new series Disturbing Landscapes, the artist’s personal experience serves as the foundation for paintings and installations that reshape his recollections of being in prison. Ambiguity and metaphorical allusion are elements in these works that speak directly of society’s paranoia, of the consequences of our actions and of the restrictions we comply with in order to fit into modern civilization. Delgado uses Google Earth to extract and digitally print images of penitentiaries which he then introduces into a conversation with faceless individuals who seem to be indifferent to the prisons beside, below or between them, not disclosing if they are confined or are themselves prisoners longing for freedom… In the wall-mounted tray installations, the artist contrasts an everyday object with his discourse. These trays are used in places where food is served to large numbers of people, such as prison dining halls. By putting them together, he turns them into an artifact that references the crudeness of a life of confinement.

Humberto Díaz
Through the use of various media, Humberto Díaz experiments with the possibility of producing in the spectator a certain degree of uncertainty as to what is real and what is fictional, creating a discourse on the different ways of perceiving objects in space. His subject matter is a critique of contemporary societies. Tsunami uses the depiction of a devastating natural phenomenon to create a metaphor for the processes of expansion and globalization and the financial crisis. It also references the lack of “roofs” in Cuba, his native country. Affluent has to do with the dematerialization and destruction of objects that consumer societies have constituted as fundamental to the lives of individuals. The photograph documents a real and current installation in Nayarit, Mexico. The scale model is on exhibit at the Nina Menocal Gallery in Mexico City. For Humberto Díaz, the crafting of a scale model is an undertaking whose entire creative process enables him to produce the effect of matter when projected into space, between the world of ideas and the world of the achievable. Each model has its own æsthetic qualities, and in a sculptural sense, each represents how the artist’s ideas begin taking shape, thereafter materializing in another space and larger dimension.

Duvier del Dago
The theme of Political Iconography, del Dago’s series of drawings and paintings, is the corruption of political power, which he blends with images that eroticize the abuse of a people and the dishonoring of national symbols. It likens power to the force of the female body in all its sensuality. The series contains a specific group of works entitled State Secret whose subject matter is still corruption, but based on the experience of individuals within a people. They talk about local topics and their main focus are students, teachers and grant recipients within state-sponsored programs. The Battle of Ideas, for instance, points to the persistent reiteration of the Revolution through the schooling that begins in early childhood, and the access to culture in his country.

Sandra Ramos
The pieces making up the Exodus series once again take up the figure of the female “pioneer” who represents the artist’s alter ego and symbol of her childhood within the context of the Cuban Revolution’s Utopia. Here, the works serve as a travel diary composed of photographs taken during her last sojourn in the United States in 2009, digitally reproduced and intersected by classic 19thcentury etchings that reinforce the surreal and dreamlike character of the final images. As in the rest of her work, Ramos accentuates the strangeness of the situations and characters, establishes relationships between the landscape and human figures that are independent of time and highlight the estrangement of individuals when faced with this new and alien world they look upon from a place of innocence.

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