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Indepth Arts News:
"Pictures of You: Inaki Bonillas, Minerva Cuevas, Mario Garcia-Torres, and Yoshua Okon."
2002-04-03 until 2002-05-19
Americas Society
New York, NY,
USA
Pictures of You brings together four artworks that call attention to looking,
where expectation is more determining than observation. The work included in
this exhibition employs and captures intrinsic sensorial and structural qualities
that an image or the pictorial comprises, yet relies on perceptive modes other
than the visual to announce them. Rather than presenting a set of pictures, the
works drawn for Pictures of You can be seen as artistic propositions that
underline the significance and [political] potential of imagination. Each signals or
triggers a play of thought-associations that provokes the construction of an
image, and in a way, the development of the work.
Iñaki Bonillas (b.1981, Mexico City) addresses the use of the photographic camera incorporating synaesthetic
strategies that complicates fixed categories or images of photography. Bonillas has realized a
series of works where he concentrates specifically on light in which this element is registered in
sound or text rather than with photography. In his piece 10 cámaras documentadas
acústicamente [10 Cameras Documented Acoustically] (1998), Bonillas registered the amount of
light that enters a camera lens. To create this piece, Bonillas recorded the sounds of ten different
cameras emitted at various speeds of the lens shutter. 10 cámaras documentadas
acústicamente, which was originally installed at a Tower Records store in Mexico City, will be
displayed here in a listening-station accessible to the audience. The listening-station contains 10
CDs, each titled by the name of the camera, and each including a number of music tracks titled by
numbers (identical to its duration) of the various lens apertures.
Through Mejor Vida Corp., Minerva Cuevas (b.1975, Mexico City) has produced and circulated
student identifications and letters of recommendation to anyone who requested, and has
distributed sticker barcodes with made-up lower prices to substitute price tags at major franchise
supermarkets. In addition to her ‘operations’ with micro-activist strategies, Cuevas has also created
a body of work in video that investigates the making, sometimes fusion, of performance and image.
Selfdoor (1998), consisting of a wall-size video projection, pictures the artist in a darkened room
repeatedly striking a wall with a hammer. The video ends when the artist has completely dismantled
the wall and an image of a landscape appears. Selfdoor, produced during an artistic residency at
the Banff Center for the Arts, Canada, will be on view for the first time in New York City on the
occasion of this exhibition.
During the last three years, Mario García-Torres (b.1975, Moncolva, Mexico) has been working as
an artist and as independent curator of new media. Amongst his work is Abastecedora de
Galerias [The Gallery Store] (2001–ongoing), a project allegedly in development-phase that
consists of creating and providing a series of products for art museums and galleries. For this
exhibition, García-Torres will manufacture prototypes of two products found in the store’s catalog:
an air freshener (scent of oil paint), created in collaboration with
Carlos Bermeo, a chemist at Herner & Reiner, Mexico City; and various signature-white, latex wall
paints. The air freshener will be exhibited in a container, and will be sprayed in the space for the
scent to linger in the gallery throughout the exhibition period. For the signature-paints, which will be
presented as swatches painted on the gallery wall, García-Torres has created the paints himself,
based on whites used in oil paintings by Mexican masters, such as Diego Rivera, Carlos Nava
Mérida, and Hermengildo Bustos, as well as by two contemporary artists, Yishai Jusidman and
Rubén Ortíz-Torres.
Yoshua Okon
(b.1970, Mexico City) has largely made use of the video camera as a tool to register his
happenings or the performances (of others) that he orchestrates. Performance is still intrinsic to his
work, but in the last years his use of the video camera has changed significantly. Presenta
[Presents] (1998) is a video that takes as its core subject the structure of video (or artwork)
production itself. This video, which runs for three minutes as a continuous loop and is displayed on
a television monitor, is a blunt, visual parade of official credits and logos, all of them from various
civic and cultural establishments in Mexico, both private and public. Thus, the script and footage of
the piece consists solely in the visual and sonorous presentation of a couple dozen sponsors and
supporters to a video program of some kind that never gets shown. The voices that translate the
logos (that basically makes known the acronym that these figure) employ the generic accent, pace
and tone used in radio and television programming.
Influenced yet significantly different to conceptualism of the 1960s or to more recent art as
institutional critique, the work by Bonillas, Cuevas, García-Torres, and Okon does not attack or
provoke an establishment. Instead, one of its ends is to generate through aesthetics a set of
exchanges.
The artists, each in a particular way, deliberately work, not accidentally or outside of an
establishment, but in homology or within it, as a way and site where significant interventions, if any,
can take place. (Intervention refers here to an artistic strategy that has the potential of interruption,
extension, or transformation of a given scenario.) IMAGE:
Minerva Cuevas.
Selfdoor, 1998
Video projection, dimensions variable
Courtesy of the artist and
Galería Kurimanzutto, Mexico City
with the support of
The Banff Centre, Canada.
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