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Nuevo Arte:
Aldo Castillo Gallery
In Tatiana Parcero's Acto de Fe, #2 (Act of Faith #2) (acetate and Lambda print: 42 x 35 in.: 2003) the subject stands facing the camera, her hands covering eye and ear in a stylized gesture that emphasizes the geometries of her body. Upon and about her pale form are an array of words and symbols, agua, rosa, bufeo, perro, an almost horological or astrological diagram projected upon her skin. Acto de Fe, #2 and eighteen other works are on exhibit in Nuevo Arte: Collección Tequila Don Julio, a traveling exhibition representing the latest in Mexican and Mexican-American contemporary art, which makes its Chicago stop at the Aldo Castillo Gallery. Sponsored by Tequila Don Julio, Mexico's premium luxury tequila brand, Nuevo Arte: Collección Tequila Don Julio has toured to New York and Houston, and after Chicago will move on to Los Angeles for its final stop. When the tour is complete the works will be donated by Tequila Don Julio to The Mexican Museum in San Francisco to become part of its permanent collections. Like the array of diagrammatical elements in Acto de Fe, #2, the works in Nuevo Arte: Collección Tequila Don Julio approach the Latin experience from all points of the compass in both media and intent. Some artists follow outer expressions, the exterior markers of possession used to define one's self. Others express inner states, questioning values, making cultural commentary, and above all, framing expressions of identity, whether questioning or affirming, Mexican, Chicano and Latino cultural heritage.
Marcos Ramirez "Erre's" La Mona (Lambda print, face mounted on Optix acrylic, over aluminum: 11 x 33 in.: 2006) and Francisco Fernández Taka's Hidra (mixed media on paper: 10 x 14 in.: 2005) share an affinity in their expression of an inner state of restlessness, dissatisfaction, unrest. Erre's La Mona is presented in the form of a postcard, whether real or imaginary, from a Miguel Robles-Durrien to a friend in The Netherlands. The work is divided into two halves. On the right-hand side is Robles-Durrien's letter, sketchy writing on a yellow background. It is a meditation on coming back to Mexico, apparently as a returning expatriate, and its most direct and caustic reference is to how such a return refreshed sharply his awareness of the discrimination he experiences. The letter closes by noting that "There is no doubt that the new war will happen between the two parts of the ecuador [equator], the two hemispheres, the social inequalities will trigger the mass." That the letter is addressed to a friend in distant Europe, rather than to an acquaintance in the United States, adds further layers of multicultural overtones. Returning from abroad only highlights the disparities and politics of what one has left behind. In surreal complement to the text, on the left side a titanic nude figure lifts her arm to the sky, dominating the barrio shacks and ramshackle boxes that crowd and crouch at her feet. She is La Mona (The Doll), and bizarre as it may seem, she is real, a 56-foot-tall half-sculpture, half-dwelling built in 1989 in a suburb of Tijuana by sculptor Armando Muñoz Garcia. She is a curious image, a Lady Liberty of the slums, stripped nude and abandoned, lifting her lamp among the squatting shacks. Her heroic pose brings to mind the opening images of Maria Lando, the haunting ballad by Afro-Peruvian singer Susana Baca: "La madrugada estalla como una estatua/ Como una estatua de alas que se dispersan por la ciudad" (The dawn breaks like a statue/ Like a winged statue spreading across the city...). In Maria Lando, the woman of the title "Only works/ only works/ only works, and her work is for others"; and at the feet of La Mona, the squatter's homes echo that relentless hardship and toil. Erre's La Mona stands alone and mute, quizzical and achingly poignant, lifting up both criticism and hope in the face of Robles-Durrien's letter.
Where Erre's discontent stands poised between image and text, Francisco Fernández Taka's Hidra reflects its inner turmoil graphically. Two stout legs swell upward into a tangled, worm-like seething of tentacles, carved out in this drawn image by line and shape. A white form picked out from the shadows behind is either horse or beast. Slashed across the canvas is a dark, sprawling stain, reminiscent of coffee or blood splattered in some violent fit. The brown colors are moody, both the layering and the tormented tangle suggesting uncomfortable layers of cultural accommodation. The random coffeelike splash contains surprising hints of rage or attack, as if the artist rejects the very image he has drawn. Language is fundamental, the most intimate element of identity both ethnic and personal. Nothing comes so close to the bone in defining who you are, with whom you identify, with whom you can meld -- or from what you are cut off. In My Pocha Tongues (blown glass and medicinal herbs: 12 x 4 x 1 in. to 7 x 5 x 1 in.: 2005), artist Viva Paredes references the pocha, slang for a Mexicana who can't speak Mexican: Mexican by culture, but cut off and different. Arrayed on the wall, the blown glass vessels are long, short, thick, thin, tongues of animals and human beings, tongues of many degrees of suppleness, shape and substance. Composed of clear, slightly frosted glass, each is filled with a different substance: dried flower buds, wood shavings, wheat, herbs. But what are the pocha tongues? Trophies? Representations of her own experience? Memories of different linguistic transactions, each with its own flavor, sweet, astringent or bitter? My Pocha Tongues walks an intriguing line between criticism and accommodation. That the herbs are identified as 'medicinal' adds a healing or mediating feel to the presentation.
In considering the works to be chosen for Nuevo Arte: Collección Tequila Don Julio, the intent of curator Tere Romo (also curator for The Mexican Museum) was twofold: one the one hand to showcase recent work by Mexican and Mexican-American artists, and on the other, to include at least one or two artists resident in each of the cities the collection would tour. For Chicago, that artist is Michael Hernandez de Luna, who presents his own brand of impudence in playfully irreverent stamp art. Included in Nuevo Arte: Collección Tequila Don Julio is Hernandez de Luna's McBarbie (2005), in which an obese odalisque of a Barbie doll lounges beneath the ubiquitous Golden Arches. With McBarbie, two of America's ultimate pop-cultural brand identities collide -- Barbie, the classic big-bosomed, wasp-waisted plastic ingenue, and the realities of a McDonalds' fast food culture bent on pre-fab flavor and convenience. As in Morgan Spurlock's 2004 documentary, "Super Size Me", in which he explored the physical deterioration caused by eating McDonalds meals for 30 days, here Barbie too has larded on the pounds in Hernandez de Luna's cheeky cultural commentary. Like all Hernandez de Luna's stamp art, half the fun is passing it off as the real thing. McBarbie has made an actual trip through the U.S. Postal System. Alongside the sheet of McBarbie stamps, one McBarbie affixed to a letter as postage shows official USPS cancellation, a coda that lends a particular savor to this subversive and clever offering.
With such diverse offerings as Nuevo Arte: Collección Tequila Don Julio presents, one can touch on only a few highlights that show the complexity of references presented in these pieces. The auto, that external symbol of identity and wealth, reappears in several works, from the reverent, almost mystical retablo-style presentation of the vintage lowrider in Ray Abeyta's Bomba Barrococo (oil on linen painting: 26 x 30 in.: 2004) to Huella de la Alhambra IV (Treads of the Alhambra) (tire with gold leaf incrustations: 7 x 20 in.: 2005) by Betsabeé Romero, a tire retreaded to Baroque excess with ornamental incising and gold leaf. Julio César Morales's Lowrider Mambo (mixed media installation: 12 x 12 ft.: 2006) mounts four superbly-chromed lowrider tire rims on snare drum stands, each with a name in flashy script: Rock, Funk, Dengue, "Psicodelico". They are arranged on a platform beneath the script "Que Rico El Mambo!", for which the most immediate reference is Cuban bandleader Dámaso Perez Prado's (1916-1989) 1950s smash hit of the same name. The mambo itself derives from Cuban and Afro-Cuban sources; Prado, credited with bringing 'the mambo craze' to the United States, was ostracized for catering too wholly to the Anglo tastes, and Lowrider Mambo presents a commentary on cultural intersections, transactions and accommodations. Franco Mondini Ruiz's La Mojado (mixed media: 4 x 6 x 6 in.: 2005) is a shrewd play on words. The elegant ceramic cup filled with faux 'tea' seems symbolic of the high culture of Spanish colonialism, with its small ceramic figure floating helplessly in the middle, and the title can mean 'the dunked one' -- the ceramic figure; the small cookie tucked in elegantly alongside -- and is, as well, a slang term for 'wetback'. Nuevo Arte: Collección Tequila Don Julio showdates are: New York, White Box, January 12 - February 3, 2007; Houston, New World Museum, March 16 - April 7, 2007; Chicago, Aldo Castillo Gallery, April 27 - May 26, 2007; and Los Angeles, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), June 13 - August 19, 2007. Following the tour, the nineteen works will enter the permanent collections of the newly renovated galleries of the Mexican Museum (www.mexicanmuseum.org), San Francisco, CA. Artists featured in Nuevo Arte: Collección Tequila Don Julio are Ray Abeyta (New York, NY), Tania Candiani (Tijuana, Mexico), Caleb Duarte (Oakland, CA), Francisco Fernández Taka (Mexico City, Mexico), Camille Rose Garcia (Los Angeles, CA), Dr. Lakra (Oaxaca, Mexico), Franco Mondini-Ruiz (San Antonio, TX), Julio C. Morales (San Francisco, CA), Tatiana Parcero (Mexico City, Mexico), Viva Paredes (San Francisco, CA), Marcos Ramirez "Erre" (San Ysidro, CA), Jorge Rojas (Brooklyn, NY), Betsabeé Romero (New York, NY), Arturo Ernesto Romo (Los Angeles, CA), and Einar & Jamex de la Torre (San Diego, CA). --Katherine R. Lieber Katherine R. Lieber has edited ArtScope.net's Visual Arts reviews since 1998. Ms. Lieber is Editor and Associate Producer for ArtScope.net. Editorial Note: Michael Hernandez de Luna was previously reviewed by ArtScope.net in The Stamp Art and Postal History of Michael Thompson and Michael Hernandez de Luna, February 2001 (http://www.artscope.net/VAREVIEWS/StampArt0201.shtml) and Text-Book Of Insanity, April 2000 (http://www.artscope.net/VAREVIEWS/BookofInsanity.shtml). Hernandez de Luna's work has also been published in the book The Stamp Art & Postal History of Michael Thompson & Michael Hernandez De Luna (Bad Press Books: Sept 2001). This and other books mentioned in www.artscope.net reviews may be purchased through our Amazon.com link or by clicking on the link above. Works by Dr. Lakra are being included in Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City, on exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art (http://www.mcachicago.org/), Chicago, June 23 - September 2, 2007. |
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