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.