Arte Al Día / International / Contents / Artists / News / Sixteen Latin American artists exploring Cultural Landscapes at the UMUC
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Map of Truth, 2008
Pieces of clothing belonging to the artist, wood, and
embroidery floss, 132 x 93 in.
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Vista:
Unfolding the
Mapping Process
Curated by Jodie Dinapoli and Eva Mendoza Chandas
Graphic
representations of maps and places are characterized by the nature of their
content and purpose, which makes the process of mapping range from the simplest
to most complex forms of depiction.
For hundreds of years artists have been involved in the process of
mapping as well as capturing the visible features of a site. From lines on
ceramic plaques to accurate cartographies and mathematical designs, this
activity has served as a tool to resolve practical issues such as territorial
and political boundaries, and to outline scientific information as well as further
investigative notions of identity.
Departing from the original concept of a map and the process of its
creation, Vista exhibits works by Contemporary Latin American Artists
inspired by mapmaking as a creative and exploration process, including
compositions based on memory, identity and utopian views of the future. This
process involves outlining, charting, depicting, building and tracing, as well
as distortion and other less cartographical techniques.
When
artist Horacio Zabala began working on maps of Argentina and South
America in the 1970s, he introduced a new framework of semantic reference to
the objects he altered. In Six images
of fragment 30 (Argentina) III maps are deformed and reworked in a way that alters both
the purpose and the function of the original image, modifying the concepts
of the cartographical order through the addition of elements that incorporate a
certain degree of randomness to the act of creation. The result is a series of
images that are neither entirely random nor totally accurate.
Imprecision is one of the premises of Carola Bravo´s work, which focuses
on blurring the limits of the concept of territory. Bravo´s endeavor
departs from the idea that maps are by nature a distortion of reality,
something limited and incapable of transmitting the “infinity” of a territory.
Combining line and space, her work aims to highlight the flexibility and
openness of the mapping exercise. Shaking our world is a construction in
space based on seismic data organized in groups of drawn circles that show
epicenters of real earthquakes. Bravo´s technique aims to present the world
through its underground explosions, making the size of each circle proportional
to the scale of the seism. In the video Mutant Maps, Bravo continues to
highlight the imprecision of the maps by drawing lines over lines that
correspond to diagrams of her hometown in Venezuela. Embracing the line as the
center of all human relations, Bravo invites viewers to add their own referential
connections.
Science
and connectivity are at the heart of Rafael
Vargas Suarez´s work, resulting in drawings and paintings dominated by
lines over a negative space. An Astronomer and Art Historian, Vargas Suarez is
interested in the relationship between artists and scientists in culture. His
works reflect this association, representing the connections between different
types of data, ranging from astronomical to medical and historical. Cosmodrome Vectors outlines space walks
through the algebraic model of information representation,
presenting a black and white composition in which black references the outlying
space. This elucidates our complex physiological relationship to space, whether
we understand it as something either known —a map or a territory of his native
Mexico—or unknown, beyond our reach.
References to unknown stories and
memories are represented in Vacío (Empty)
by Rodrigo Echeverri Depicted in a minimal-style language, this diptych presents
a geometrical composition of solid monochromatic blocks arranged on a white
backdrop. Echeverri uses minimalism as a
tool to reference personal and contextual narratives. In this case the work
refers to the information provided by the black boxes airlines use. These boxes
contain encoded pieces that give information not only on the history of a
journey but also on the memories of the travelers.
Alberto
Borea develops
maps as a way to record his own experiences in time and space. In this sense
Borea’s works are a residue of his identity quest. In Invisible World two
globes have been separated from their stands, which are left unused, but then gain
importance in a game in which all the elements appear to be equally
significant. In Cardiogram, Borea uses
cut-out names from popular art guides to highlight the commercialism of his
profession in a graphic representation of the vibrant pulse of the world of Latin
American artists living in the US.
Támara Kostianovsky
pieces together enormous maps from the artist’s own altered
clothing. Rendering a territory in expansion, the clothes are sewed together to
form abstract maps that narrate a very personal perspective. The Map of
Truth is a composition that explores the idea of how identity is imprinted
on the skin. This poetical narrative, drawn from the artist´s personal
experience, is also the point of departure of Esperanza Mayobre´s Temporal Humanitarian Status. From the perspective
of herself as an immigrant the artist in this piece uses an eye chart composed of visas to the United States. Next
to the chart, Mayobre sets an architectural drawing representing a grid continuously
perpetuating itself, which is followed by an image of a wall depicting each
immigrant´s own border.
Inverting the idea of
impenetrable borders, José Ruíz´s No Diaspora
invites us to transcend this notion and reflect on the multiple readings derived
from the resulting experience and that of returning home at last, rather than
endlessly departing and having to set up a new residence.
The dichotomy
between mobility and stability is presented in Gisela Insuaste´s Fe and Vacuums en camino- por el cielo y la tierra, fragmented interventions in
space forming a composite of different places she has traveled to and of
references to her home and her family, Ecuadorians who immigrated to the United
States in the 70s. Using interdependent ambiguous parts from different kinds of
collected materials, such as wood, wire, vacuum cleaner parts, and paper. This
visual “mapping” of her own past and present transforms the exhibition space as
she questions those cultural conventions embedded in the urban and
architectural principles that determine our cultural spaces.
Cultural
differences are always present in the lives of those who have left their home
countries. Travelers and foreigners have to adapt to new environments where,
even if similar, conditions are never exactly the same as those left behind.
Relocation implies reorganization. The exercise of adjusting to a different
context requires new systems of organization, which may be why this technique
is visually vital in the works of artists like Silvina
Arismendi. She uses fragments from everyday life as elements
that, when put together, describe a personal navigation. In Untitled, Arismendi presents a sequence
of canvases that are painted black. Arranged by size, they grow within the
space as parts of a dark sky at night.
Pilita García l recreates
unknown expanding cities and spaces, organizing them in layers that comprise a
mass of superimposed structures, lines and images. In Gallery, these
visual structures transform the wall of the exhibition space into a view of a
gallery space by arranging different materials such as paper, collage and
canvas that seemingly recall a familiar space, one that can be created through
an online database of images.
These
new visual systems are employed by Camilo Sanin, who overlaps grids and
other geometric patterns to establish new visual arrangements of the space
around him, as can be seen in Estructura Subyacente. In Epipelagic One and Mesopelagic One, the artist takes his research underwater and
studies the variances in superimposing grids at different levels below the
surface of the earth.
In
contrast to Sanin’s pronounced geometry, Elena Patiño creates
organic-shaped installations. Using synthetic mass-produced materials, she
crafts hand felted balls that scatter across the wall, as in Color
Migration, where single units form a greater mass, alluding to what takes
place in a heavily industrialized society. Invariably in this kind of discourse,
which focuses on the perspective of outsiders, the need arises to compare what
is known to what is being discovered, as well as to that which is better or
worse, or what can or cannot be improved This analysis takes into account different
geographies, cultures and times, past, present and future.
This is consistent with the way some artists in
their works suggest other possible realities or time frames in their depictions
of the present. Nicky Enright, for example, presents
what could be a global future monetary currency. The Globo is a work composed of bills in an attaché case set on a
pedestal and framed prints of the bills representing a world unified under a
hypothetical single currency. This work envisions a global unity, suggesting
that social progress runs parallel to the increasing reach of corporate
financial influence.
Another
interpretation of this globalized future is presented by Priscila de
Carvalho in Wonderland and Settlements, in which the artist introduces
urban landscapes inhabited by slum dwellers, revealing the complexity of a
society where progress has multiple profiles and repercussions. For his part, Cesar
Cornejo explores new models of relation between the individual and
the constructed environment. His Museomorphosis II redefines traditional
models and proposes alternative architectural constructions that impede social
injustice and attend to the revitalization of the communities and to the
improvement of their living conditions.
Through structures, abstractions, urban landscapes,
installations and new media, Vista reveals different approaches to the process
of understanding territory from the social to the personal, from the concrete
to the abstract, from the exceptional to the conventional. All the artworks have
been brought together to debate and to show the different possibilities of maps,
understanding them as evolving social, political and cultural constructions
derived from changing cosmologies and canons.
