The Artifact.

The artifact as a subject has been a recent topic in my work. My interest in the artifact initially came from a personal involvement with performance art that started about four years ago. While I was in college there was a general re-visiting of the second wave feminist movement and as a result I was looking at artists who dealt with taboo subjects in the 1960’s and 70’s. I experimented with performance partially to understand how it worked as a political apparatus and also because I wanted to find out which taboo subjects existed in the art world at the time. I arrived at some conclusions, most of which are inconsequential to what I am doing right now but while I was exploring these subjects I momentarily abandoned painting to focus on performance. Eventually, I began to think of such things as Carolee Schneeman’s Internal Scroll and Eve Klein’s Anthropométries, objects that function as recordings of time-based significant actions or performance artifacts.

Formal Modification, Cosmetic Layer.

I have a new show coming up, and while curating, it’s been good to reevaluate things that I had done in the past, and to compare them to the recent work made in Korea. What is surprising are not the differences, but the similarities between now and before, and in realizing this I have become aware of a habit that I’m starting to consider very essential to my modus operandi. Maybe I had tried to describe it before but had failed, but here is another attempt.

Culture is Exclusive.

Is culture like a collective curatorial project? Cornel West defines culture in Prophetic Reflections, p. 137, as "values and attitudes that are embodied or expressed in texts, artifacts, or performances, sustained by communities over time, preserving various identities of unique individuals within those communities." It's interesting to think about how much of this process is constructed subconsciously and how much of it is schemed. Any culture that may be described by a word plus the morpheme '-ness' is inherently talking about purity. Considering the history of purity in relationship to the human race, it's hard to live without paranoia.

Cultural Heritage, Authority, and Immigration.

I’ve been up to catching up with my reading. I’ve been taking up nineteenth century classics that I never got to read when I was in high school. I’ve been busy painting and listening to audio books in the process, so that when I look at my paintings they remind me of stories. I have been thinking about the meaning of the term cultural heritage and how it applies to migrant people. Are those English and North American classics that I've been reading part of my "cultural heritage"? Am I responsible for them and do I have the right to claim them as part of my background?

To the common citizen cultural background is taken for granted, but to the immigrant, cultural background becomes a responsibility and a construct. The common citizen is fed literature, art, and language automatically and systematically from his native environment all of his life. The immigrant brings a personalized idea of what his cultural background is and adjusts it to his new surrounding in an attempt to comply with new political expectations. Part of this process of integration requires an understanding of the new environment: Language is a good example for without a basic understanding of a local language an immigrant will always be marginalized by default. Other idiosyncrasies and knowledge modified during this process are taste, mannerisms, and vocabulary. All of these plus the tangible artifacts left by past generations are considered a culture's heritage.

Statement For The Gold of Your Horizons.

My current project consists in the partial obliteration of objects that are fundamental to the construction of a cultural identity. Examples of these are memorabilia, cultural or religious figures (including mythological, folkloric, historical, or artistic icons) and prehistoric or ancient artifacts that aid in the invention of an ancestral past.

How important are these objects (or subjects) in the long run? How easy or how difficult is it to forget them? The poporo, a Muisca statuette, the Tahíno words in my vocabulary: patata, tiburón, maíz, bohío; and the Arabic ones: algarroba, aceite, limón, arroz. Do we remember the functions of these tokens accurately or do we construct them? Do we modify them to fit our ideologies or even our tastes? Am I entitled to my mother’s memories? Do I inherit my past or do I reinvent it? How does collective memory function? These are questions that I ask myself constantly.

English Lit.

I recently got one of those forwarded messages from a friend. The ones that you are supposed to read, modify and forward to other people. Except this was not really a message but a facebook note in which I was tagged. It was about a list of 100 books made by BBC. The broadcaster supposedly alleged most people only have read an average of 6 of the books included. I was supposed to go through the list, bold the books I have read in their entirety and italicize the ones I only started reading but did not finish, or read only an excerpt. Then I was to create my own note with the list and tag the friend who sent me the message along with other “book nerds” explaining the process so that it could all be publicized and compared.

When I received the note I immediately felt ashamed because I already knew that I was about to confront one of my biggest insecurities – my literary command, and that I was thrown into a game that I could not win. It is not that I consider myself stupid or incapable of playing this game and in fact, if what BBC says about this list is correct then I am above the level of the average reader (at least in England), but I still feel panicky when I see myself forced to discuss this topic in public.

I will not make my own note for my Facebook acquaintances to see and I will not tag anyone in it, but if I did, this is what it would look like:

Évita from ET AL., ETC.

This is really lazy but I'm going to redirect to another post from another blog that is not mine. But basically Évita talks about the things she makes.

AM needs a projector.

This might be the last painting that I make in which the image is not traced directly from a projector. For this one I used the old method of amplifying a sketch with a grid. Realistically though, this process is not fast enough and it is extremely tedious and annoying. I have decided that to produce a justifiable body of work (in terms of time) the drawing has to be completely figured out before the painting is started, and amplified with a projector.

Yongsan International Art Exhibition

Opening at 5:00pm on Monday October 18th, goes down on the 22nd.

Yongsan Culture Art Hall (1st Floor) Itaewon. Nearest subway station: Noksapuyeong Station line 6 exit 3 (5 minutes walk to center) Seoul.

for directions click here

Casa Gutierrez

I am writing in the near darkness of the dawn after another night, the third one in a row to be exact, of painting the Gutierrez House which lies about 600 meters of the house where I grew up. This old traditional coffee plantation is an important building in the history of Medellín for its age and exemplarity, as it has appeared in various historic documents about the city for being an axis of development around the area, and for its very specific architectural design. While painting it, and as a result of a conversation I had with my father about it, I have come to realize there is a possibility that after ten years of abandonment, it might be safe again to move back into the house. It has been for sale since we left and there have been various offers including one by the state itself to turn the house into some sort of museum, but either the distance from the city center or the danger related to the Colombian countryside have always prevented the transaction.

IAC Group Show

Yes, I will be in a show called Domestic Bliss, and I'm afraid that my entry, for better or worse will undoubtedly look ironic.

Opening Saturday, August 21st from 6:00 to 9:00 pm.

In Na Gallery and Jay Gallery, in Insadong.

For more information and directions click here or above.

This exhibition is featured in Neolook.com

Carlos Motta Pertaining and the Ongoing Colombian Elections

A multi-channel video installation in which performers recite six different peace speeches that were once delivered by different Colombian political leaders whose ideologies have resulted in their own assassinations. To read more and watch the videos follow the link:

http://www.carlosmotta.com/sixacts.html

Or visit his page on Artsy for Motta's bio, over 130 of his works, exclusive articles, and exhibition listings. 

Children's Charity Art Auction

Auction scheduled for May 16th at 1:30 pm, for more information about this event click here.

Proposals for The Late Work

The Late Work is a show curated by Kevin Zucker and Christopher Ho. Both artists are also RISD professors. Some of their former students made proposals for pieces that hypothetically, are supposed to represent their late works. These are my proposals.

1. Requiem for a Transition - a Sketch. The images included refer to animal species that have become extinct during Kevin Zucker's Lifetime. The diagrams are of frames used for dunnage in cargo. The latter imagery becomes a reappearing element in Zucker's paintings.

2. Marzipan Boxes. Ten wooden boxes containing marzipan confections shaped like fetuses in different stages of development. They are arranged in the style of Ernst Haeckel’s 1874 illustration from Anthropogenie. The artist selects 70 of the most important people in human history according to his own criteria. The embryos are then labeled with the given names of those individuals. Christopher K. Ho believes in the inevitable obliteration of history and humanity in the distant future. The boxes of edible icons mimic the hypothesis of embryological parallelism while highlighting the inevitable perishability of the human race.

Behind Unfruitful Crits

Reading Thierry de Duve’s essay about Art Education I finally came to realize why I felt so uninspired at the end of college. In When Form Becomes Attitude, he talks about deconstruction as the new form of teaching art in college (this essay is from 1994 but it’s still pretty true, at least at RISD).

There are a couple of problems here. It is the method of deconstruction that has evolved with postmodernism that smothers art students into quiet despair, or else it drives them into a drunken stupor by the end of senior year. According to this model there is always a way to take apart verbally a work of art (or anything else) and to figure out what it is about. It presupposes that categorization is an inherent factor of critiquing art.

Installation View from Proactive Solutions

The Cigarette Filter piece inside Proactive Solutions. Behind it are some fake flowers from Arleen Delima's installation. A video by Sean Monahan The Passion of George W. Bush, Artifact No. 2 and the Library Due Date Installation. The slim wall to the left was a space intervention by Jessica Reaves.

MYSPACEWASTAKEN.com

Tatiana Berg Hannah Black Arleen Delima Seán Monahan Andrés Monzón Grant Pylon Maria Salas

at the Memorial Hall Gallery

Cinco de Mayo, 2009.

FADO

object

About the Cigarette Piece

I am interested in the paradoxical nature of smoking: an action that disrupts and formulates routine simultaneously, that is pleasant and repulsive, meditative and stress-producing, comforting and destructive. Cigarettes filters which are made out of cotton are tinted as a result of a series of repetitive inhalations by the smoker. In some cases the color of the butts is also determined by their subsistence under different weather conditions. By collecting, slicing, and attaching together the cigarette butts, I gave these disposable devices an unexpected and prolonged life. I created a skin like an animal fur that is the product of different phenomena – including natural production, corporate manufacture and advertisement, personal consumption, and weather conditions. At a first glance or from far away, the skin seems like raw material for the fabrication of luxury items like handbags or shoes, but when examined closely, it is repulsive to sight and smell.

Even though the formal qualities of this material are relevant, the performance aspects involved in the fabrication of it are most important: from the act of smoking to the discarding of the butts, to my collecting them to my assembling them into a skin. The Cigarette Butt Piece is an artifact made of repetitive and automatic actions and its appearance is mostly developed by chance.