Life And Death
Two Day of the Dead installations explore the soul's otherworldly journey.

Oct 24, 2002
By Rick Deragon

A fusion of two worlds, the living and the dead, highlight the late October season as installations that explore our uneasy relationship with mortality emerge out of the darkened atmosphere of the Lisa Coscino Gallery in Pacific Grove.

Mexico City artist Jorge Llaca and Monterey Peninsula artist Jana Weston transform spaces in the gallery into a last supper celebrating death''s transcendence, in Llaca''s case, and the complexities of familial connections in Weston''s. Impelled both by the artists'' chosen details and the general effect achieved by their arrangements, viewers face their own attitudes toward death-a fitting topic as October 31 trips into November 1.

The Mexican culture''s rich tradition of celebrating the Day of the Dead is the inspiration for Llaca''s installation and Weston''s skull-festooned altar. As a means to honor ancestors'' souls, and, probably, to help make sense of life, commemorative altars are built, graveyards are decorated, all-night vigils are held on and around the first day of November. Favorite foods and confections are gathered on the altars as ofrendas for the departed.

It''s a sensory feast. Fresh paint on tombs, flower petal carpets, wafting incense, flickering candles, intense colors everywhere. The resonant hum of prayers being whispered; laughter, weeping.

Installation art, a participatory, if ephemeral, form of sculpture, has been in ascendance for the last 25 years. Explanations for this may vary-the passing of traditional art training, artists'' perceived competition with flashy electronic mediums, the immediacy of found objects, artists'' desire to be larger-than-life. It is an art form that has its roots in Duchamp, the proto-conceptual German artist Merz, Rauschenberg, Hesse, and the happenings of the 1960s.

Llaca, who has studied with several experimental artists in Mexico City, specializes in the installation format. His designed spaces are total experiences. He guides the viewer/participant into a hyper-world of sensation and content; his objects are lodestones of emotional content, their arrangements private realms of meaning.

According to gallery owner Lisa Coscino, Llaca arrives on the scene of an impending installation empty handed, but with a vision, and proceeds to gather objects from the immediate region that he feels will help manifest his ideas. In this way, the art, the installation, and the viewer/participant''s experience, rises from this very place, rather than being imported, imposed, from elsewhere.

In his Day of the Dead installation in Pacific Grove, a banquet table, a la Christ''s Last Supper, will be assembled, encouraging visitors to face not only their own mortality, but, perhaps, their spiritual relationship with the other side.

Weston, the granddaughter of photographer Edward Weston, has built human-like skulls and painted them in the Mexican tradition as a way of paying homage to family members who have died. "I really became fascinated with these images 20 years ago," says Weston, "when I fell in love with Frieda Kahlo''s art. I just felt such a connection. It was so personal. Her horrible physical experiences as a child, her health problems, were also things I identified with."

After years of experimenting on different surfaces and forms, Weston focused her attention on painted skulls and her family. "The two sides of my family were difficult and complicated. Some years ago I became bedridden for a while and had a lot of time for reflection," Weston recalls. "Some of it was painful. So, a lot of that goes into the painting of the skulls. I paint the name of the dead person on it, then put on mementos of their lives."

In his Day of the Dead installation last year at the Lisa Coscino Gallery, Llaca included a photograph of Jana Weston. An acquaintance was kindled; he encouraged her with her Mexican-inspired work. The result is a shared gallery this year.

In addition to the two featured installations, the gallery will decorate its own altar with ofrendas from 40 other artists who have been asked to submit a photograph or memento of an ancestor or mentor who has influenced them. And, of course, the opening reception Friday promises to be special, if not haunting-everyone is requested to wear white, the better to reflect the black light inside the gallery''s installations.

The Day of the Dead installations open with a reception Friday from 6-8pm at the Lisa Coscino Gallery.

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Hidden Agendas
Lisa Coscino Gallery's new exhibit of six contemporary Mexican painters reveals a largely invisible artistic world.

May 03, 2001
By C. Kevin Smith

The ancient Greeks called the process of writing on top of a text that has been partially erased palimpsest ("scraped again"). Since that time, many artists and writers have used the term metaphorically to describe life as a series of accumulating layers that never quite obscure what came before. Even as people undergo changes in society and within their own personalities, traces of the old are always visible, just beneath the surface of the new.
This week, an outstanding new show at Pacific Grove''s Lisa Coscino Gallery illustrates how strong artists can create a sense of those different layers--personal, mythological, national, sexual--within the one-dimensional plane of a picture surface. Entitled "Sentimientos," the show features six contemporary artists born in Mexico, three of whom eventually settled in California.

Living in a foreign country allowed those three immigrant artists to reinterpret their background using the imagery of a new setting--in this case, California--and also to reinterpret their new home with the color palette and the mythological richness of the home they''d left behind.

Perhaps it is in the work of Carlos Almaraz, the only artist of the show no longer living, that this cultural doubleness is felt most powerfully. Brought by his parents to the USA as an infant, he grew up aware of what he called a "bifurcation," a knowledge of divisive racial tensions in the schools and on the streets. Yet it was within those cracks that he would find the subject and style of his art, virtuoso paintings that have attracted considerable acclaim. His work was included in last year''s blockbuster "Made in California" at the L.A. County Museum of Art.

Among the Almaraz pieces on view at Coscino''s gallery is the energetic work Deer Dancer, completed in 1989 in the final months of his life, just before he died at 48 from AIDS. In Mexican folklore, the deer dancer is a traditional figure who is stalked, hunted down by unseen forces, in this case the painter''s own approaching death. Almaraz''s version surrounds the dancer with personal symbols--his daughter as a cat, pyramids representing his ancestral home, faceless figures emerging from shadows--and while the large skull reminds us that this is a farewell to life, Alvarez''s dazzling, almost kinetic use of color celebrates and shares with all of us life''s power.

Almaraz also was famous for a series of works depicting Echo Park, which he painted from his apartment window. Alfredo de Batuc, another Mexican artist living in LA, also paints looking out his window, in his case onto downtown LA''s iconic City Hall. Like past generations'' painters of Paris, de Batuc and Almaraz offer viewers new ways of seeing the familiar shapes and colors of the city.

De Batuc''s works often feature what he calls "The Presence," a face that represents the artist''s strong spirituality, drawing both from Buddhism and ancient Olmec monuments uncovered in southern Mexico. For de Batuc, the Earth is home to deep psychic energies. Yet his work is not all serious. Notice Presence over Threesome, a painted tortilla that offers a whimsical new twist on the idea of cultural palimpsests. Another piece, Stark Gaze (watercolor on recycled envelope), engages in witty word play while also probing themes of friendship and communication.

Masked and Exposed

In 1987, a groundbreaking exhibit of contemporary Hispanic art--organized by the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC and Houston''s Museum of Fine Arts--brought a dynamic yet, until then, largely invisible artistic world to the public''s attention. Almaraz was part of that show, as was San Francisco-based painter Roberto Gil de Montes.

Nearly 15 years later, Gil de Montes again rubs artistic shoulders with Almaraz. His works on display in Coscino''s showroom can be seen as tightly focused, emotional vignettes, which often address social and political concerns. Heightening their complexity is Gil de Montes'' ambivalence about the culture of machismo: For the gay artist, the power of paintings to both reveal and shield, both mask and expose, contributes still another layer to his art.

The exhibit''s three other artists have remained in Mexico, and one way to approach the show is to compare how themes of home, nostalgia and Mexican identity have shaped the various artists'' work. Coscino notes that one of her goals in mounting this show was to highlight the sophistication of contemporary Mexican painters. "It''s not just the Day of the Dead," she says. "Contemporary artists in Mexico are dealing with the same issues as artists here."

Now living in Mazatlan, Carlos Bueno, like de Batuc, was involved in the creation of an important artists'' collaborative that helped pave the way for a whole generation of Hispanic artists. Called Self-Help Graphics, it began in a local garage in East LA in the early ''70s. Bueno''s current work includes a set of extravagant Chinese ink drawings dubbed Las Lloronas (The Crying Women). Coscino calls these works "commentaries on emotions" that celebrate the necessary power of tears. "You know when you laugh so hard you cry? Those are the tears of life!" she says.

Further diversity is present in the sensuous nudes of Isaac Ambriz, perhaps Mexico''s premier portraitist, and the realistic works of the show''s youngest artist, Jorge Llaca. Llaca''s The Scars of Mexico City series of paintings, which depict minor accident sites around the city that have become incorporated into the city''s ever-changing textures, shows how a city can also be a palimpsest. Llaca''s efforts highlight the resilience of the Mexican people and transform the city''s scars into marks of beauty.

"Sentimientos" represents a real curatorial coup. And what better way to celebrate Cinco de Mayo than to bask in the warm colors of these exciting drawings and paintings in the company of Coscino and several of the artists, who will discuss the interpretations, stories and, of course, feelings behind them on Saturday at 4:30pm.

The gallery is open on Thurs.-Sat. from 11am-5:30pm (till 2pm on Tues.-Wed.). For more info, click on www.lisacoscinogallery.com or call 646-1939.

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Observa: Cosechamos lo que sembramos
Instalación artística de Jorge Llaca

Nuestro campus universitario se encuentra dentro de una zona antaño destinada a la recepción de desechos. Los tiraderos de Santa Fe acumularon durante décadas la basura de la Ciudad de México... y entonces llegó la Ibero.

Hoy en día, los lujosos corporativos y condominios le dan otra cara al entorno, pero ¿qué pasaría si de repente toda esa basura empezara a brotar de nuevo? Seguramente veríamos algo como lo que el artista plástico e instalador Jorge Llaca, egresado de Diseño Gráfico en la UIA, imaginó: árboles con alma de hierro y recubiertos con botellas de plástico PET invaden el paisaje. Los más maduros ya muestran, colgados de las ramas altas, latas de aluminio como frutos multicolores dispuestos a arrojar su redonda semilla en forma de tapa.

Los árboles-basura prosperan bien en esta tierra. Vemos incluso que muchos brotes germinados empiezan a asomar su cuello transparente del césped. Tal vez dentro de algunos años logren imponerse a los árboles-madera y todo vuelva a ser como antes.

"Estas muestras de ...