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Indepth Arts News:
"Sin Limite – The Mexican Tsunami : Hugo Garcia Urrutia and MK Semos"
2010-04-24 until 2010-06-08
DECORAZONgallery
Dallas, ,
USA United States of America
Architectural training is always very prominent in the work of Hugo Garcia Urrutia, originally from Juarez, Mexico. Graduated from Texas Tech University in 2000, with a Bachelor of Architecture and Design, Hugo worked in the field professionally for five years before founding the Decorazon Gallery in Dallas’ Bishop Arts District in 2004. He has participated in national and international art-architecture competitions and public projects including the 2000 National Urban Poetry I Competition sponsored by AIA Cincinnati, International Architecture Competition sponsored by magazine, ARQUINE, 2005. He also participated in the design competition for the Magic Mountain: Museum of Stone Culture in Verona, Italy, a project sponsored by USA Institute, 2001.
Greek-American photographer MK Semos is a highly committed professional whose deep appreciation of beauty and culture can be found in each of her photographs. She specializes in travel and portrait photography, but is most well known for her 10+ years of work with the Holga camera. Born in Dallas, Texas, she earned Bachelor Degrees in photojournalism and photo-illustration from the University of Texas at Austin in 1995. Semos’ love and devotion to travel translates directly into the kinetic energy one feels while viewing her work. She has freelanced for New York Magazine, Business Traveler and Timeout NY, and recently her artwork has been highlighted and reviewed in publications as The Dallas Morning News and Daily Candy. She has relocated from New York City to Dallas, Texas, where she, with her partner, Hugo Garcia Urrutia, own and operate the Decorazon Gallery.
MK Semos and Hugo Garcia Urrutia first collaborated in 2005, when they did a public art project in the form of a life-size photography art installation in the newly constructed Rosemont Primary School, Chris V. Semos campus, in Dallas. They have been collaborating ever since.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Working primarily in recycled substrates and materials, Hugo Garcia Urrutia and MK Semos unify image and form along with a strong message in their current body of work, Sin Limite – The Mexican Tsunami.
Reflecting on gradual changes in Mexico’s socio-environment and the country’s ability to deal with them, Garcia- Urrutia and Semos are likening these current issues to a tsunami, in part because like a tsunami this phenomena is an epic catastrophic event, a welling up of emotion, hopefully finally reaching a culmination of awareness and awakening.
The photography work created by MK Semos and Hugo Garcia Urrutia in this collaborative exhibition is also an ongoing body of work and visual interpretation of an urban landscape, from Mexico and other cities around the globe, as places of inner experience. The imagery is initially created by MK Semos, who utilizes a manual, very basic Holga film camera, allowing her to create and manufacture intuitive collages of composition inside the camera by overlapping frames and double exposing the film. Later, after processing the film, Semos is able to choose “story boards” from her lengthy narrative of images, signs, pop-color, and surprise code.
The work is further developed with the collaborative effort of Hugo Garcia Urrutia, as he experiments with different un-orthodox substrates and photographic finishes. The photographs are printed directly onto recycled hardwood floors, allowing the viewer to experience the grains and true colors of the wood, integrating the quality of the wood into the image composition. The recycled hardwood is also reminiscent of the high foot-traffic imagery that the viewer can see in the artwork itself.
In the installation piece titled The Mexican Tsunami, created by Hugo Garcia Urrutia, the artist’s intention is to bring awareness to a now immune, and in some cases defeated community, that is numbed by an ongoing wave of violence. The metaphoric “Tsunami” in Mexico presently is embodied in an overflow of crime, drugs, economic disparity, and an overall sense of devastation in most of the population. Garcia-Urrutia’s observation over the past years is derived from his experience of being a transplant from his hometown Ciudad Juarez, on the US border to El Paso.
By definition, Tsunamis have proven to represent a significant hazard around the globe. México is no exception, because there is firm evidence of the effects of past large tsunamis. Information, and knowledge of faulting characteristics along the Mexican zone, leads to a clear differentiation of two zones of potential tsunami hazard: locally generated tsunamis, in the subsidence region, and remotely generated tsunamis north of this zone. Based on this zonation, two types of tsunami warning systems are proposed: real-time for the southern zone, and delayed-time for the northern.. Some of these sites represent important socioeconomic resources for Mexico, and have therefore been chosen for a vulnerability assessment and microzonation risk analysis…
RUBEN NIETO
In 2002, Michele Mikesell earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts with a minor in graphic design from Texas Women's University in Denton, TX. Mikesell completed her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Oklahoma in Norman in 2004. Mikesell is a Dallas Artist who lives and works in Oak Cliff and is currently represented by Chiaroscuro, Sante Fe; JRB Gallery, Oklahoma City; Altered Space Gallery, Los Angeles; and DECORAZON Gallery in Dallas. Mikesell's work can be found internationally in many private and corporate collections, including Capitol Records and Warner Brothers studios. She has had a presence in many national and international art fairs including, Bridge Art Fair during Miami Art Basel (2008), Red Dot London (2008), Art Santa Fe (2009), and the Affordable Art Fair New York (2008-2010).
ARTIST STATEMENT
Most of us have grown up playing with Legos. We learned as kids how to build a house in a playful way. Based on such play, we grew up to inhabit our own home. In today’s world, living in large urban environments, we are surrounded by architecture and urbanism. We are often unconscious of this fact because the urban setting is a part of our daily life. For that reason, our environment is transformed into a parallel world, like a Walt Disney Fantasy or a Blade Runner dystopia. In my paintings I try to recreate that parallel world and the related disruption of time and space. My compositions are based on aerial views from major cities around the world taken from Google Earth. I select a particular portion of the urban landscape and translate it into my own. As a result the original view is transformed and still recognizable as an architectural environment. In creating opaque, monochromatic backgrounds, I have removed the brushstroke and the gesture from my paintings, creating a feeling of urban alienation and autonomy where the melted pieces of Legos become the gesture itself. I do not merely add the bright color to the surface, but I use color to articulate the very surface itself. The color-cum surface of my paintings is but one component of a vast planar infinity. I drip paint on top of the Legos as a formal reference to Pollock and Abstract Expressionism. Every Lego figure takes its energy from the color ground, and is transformed into a character. I want to immerse the viewer into the world of each painting while at the same time provoking him/her to connect the Legos with their own urban environment in the surfaces and architectural landscapes of my paintings.
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