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"Sunrise and Fall", installation (wood panels, hardware, paint and drawing)

Exhibition Trapped by Mutual Affection (with Diego Fernandez and Johanna Unzueta), a project by Galerie Christian Nagel, Miami Design District, 2005

And here I am, at last.

I basically want to explain in more detail, which are my ideas and intentions for the Miami show. As you might already know the main idea of my installation is to produce a series of wooden panel-structures that will function both as support for a series of wall paintings and also as space dividers (in the sense of creating smaller spaces for the organization and distribution of the other works).
Technically the idea is to work with a basic carpentry method closer to a third word carpenter than to a first world one of course, my intention with this is to create an installation that looks fragile and a bit clumsy (no fancy wood work). I want to create structures that resemble poor and simple constructions yet at the same time function in a programmatic way, in relation to Diego and Johanna’s artwork, in relation to the exhibit as a whole. This multilayer reading has to do with my most deep believe in producing critical, sometimes functional and sometimes incomplete art works.
Part of the wall painting works will consist of a new group of “sunrise-sunset” drawings. These are intended to work is several directions too, they function in a thin line between abstraction and representation yet also they play with the dangerous decorative zone… being a repetitive drawing makes it have a pattern like structure, in a imaginary general view of the exhibition. And I like this, this apparent incongruence. I also hope this image brings to mind a mixture of possible references, the Japanese sunrise flag, a sunrise really experienced, a sunset in a cheap poster, a love song… This mixture of elements is what I am working on (in relation to these wall paintings), from iconography to the cliché to personal memories.

As part of this wall installation I also plan to incorporate smaller structures / paintings made out of wooden tables. The appropriation of this household object is intended to add a stranger element to the installation and it also intends to open up the space, there is one thing I do not want to create with these walls and that is the feeling of architecting the space, making closed “booths”. It is now a wall structure but it also has a table standing on one side? Here I want to point towards a functional design system, a popular one, lets say to an Ikea methodology, and also towards the recycling of furniture. These basic “build it your self” furniture I directly related to the Bauhaus program of democratizing design and art yet they have also become so accessible that now they people throw them away so easily, they have become disposable. Here the painted application will be that of Chalk drawing, maybe just a plain field of orange, yet dirty, muddy, full of traces and marks… a live color, yet condemned to a short lifetime. What interests me here is the crossover of the visual and conceptual aspects of the work, both active and boring, both clean and muddy, with its lifelessness, it is an act of de acting…

In these last months I have been working making several drawings of possible installations (which are in a PDF file attached to this email) and also I have been making something like construction prototypes. I am still not sure these are the final pieces because I still have to make certain formal decisions like if they have the adequate size or if a wooden background is good or not, etc. But basically in these attached images you will be able to see how these structures work, their painted side in relation to their back “constructed” side, the kind of image I am talking about, etc.

As a third possible element there are some very new drawings based on my sound music project. These Drawings are called “Mas Musica” and they are all just plain stenciled based texts that are music styles created in places or countries different from their original birthplace, “Polish Hip Hop”, “Goa Techno”, “Peruvian Protopunk”, “Finnish Rockabilly”. The idea is to present, more or less based on true events, a music style yet produced and constructed in a different context of their original formation. So “Polish Hip Hop” refers to the hip-hop movement created “originally” in Warsaw (based on American Hip Hop of the 80’s) that later returned to New York (I live in Brooklyn in a Polish neighborhood and everyday I come a cross a youngster “polish raper” and I am amused by their sense of uniqueness). “Mas Musica” comes from a Chilean TV series of the 80’s. It was one of the first local music video shows and it become for many, for some years, a window to international pop music, a window to foreign cultural movements. Even though the quality of the music and the videos was not the best or the most cutting edge stuff happening at the moment, I felt, at the time and later on too, that watching Madonna or Eric Clapton or Gloria Stefan and the Miami Sound Machine was as important to watch and listen to The Cure, The Smiths or Sex Pistols. If there is space and we all agree that these work are a plus to the overall of the exhibition these drawing could hang all together. They could be up to 10 drawings, no frame. We will see. Ok. Please take your time to review the attached images and remember that these are all just drawings in search of the final idea. I am also sending you a PDF file called “previous work”. Its final 3 pages contain images of the installation at Gasworks Studio (where I had that residency last year), and these works show that chalk idea I am explaining above.

I believe now that the exhibition as a whole is more consolidated, we have managed to propose each of us our work yet we have also discussed and worked a way to make the pieces collaborate. The important aspect is that the works will always be subordinated to another work.

And let me know what you think.

Detail of wall with drawings, "People I have met in the subway", acrilyc paint on paper, 2005

Detail of works by Johanna Unzueta and Diego Fernandez ocupying the wood panel walls as suport for their work