Terrazul

Photo: Guillermo A López

Olivia Song Park’s White Lies

Upon entering, white strings falling from the ceiling divide the gallery space. Like cords of a musical instrument, these resonate with the in vogue expression, no strings attached -- defining fleeting liaisons in today’s society. The exhibition White Lies by Olivia Song Park closed last night at Mina Dresden gallery.

Park Song makes tiny circles of perforated punch holders, Q-tip swabs, and strings, the works in White Lies create a subdued atmosphere that is a play of white on white. The white cube with a floor covered with butcher paper, and the small white pieces required an effort from the viewer to be appreciated. White is the color par excellence used in today’s contemporary art. The color white not only refers to purity, but it also alludes to issues of race.

Illuminated from behind, Hole is a round object formed by dozens of swabs sticks, creates a honeycomb-like structure. Song Park utilizes swabs not only to retouch her make up, but she also uses them as material for her art practice. The swabs allude to repetitive motions and every day actions. These activities become a ritual, and they also refer to domesticity, the body, and beauty.

A cutout paper of rectangular shape recreates concentric irregular forms at the center. Superimpossed sheets of paper create a ladder effect. The jagged lines, and pointy corners become an exercise of geometrical proportions. Recalling landscapes of earth’s crust formations, this work imitates shapes found in nature.

White Lies is an exercise on language. According to the artist, the exhibition's name is a play on words. Initially, this project stemmed from the artist trying to explore the meaning of the phrase “white lies” and its seemingly harmless meaning. In contrast, according to Song Park, a red lie in Korea means a blatant lie -impossible to mistake for a truth.

Song Park’s preoccupation leads her to the making of her craft in an attempt to arrest the inexorable passing of time. Song Park’s quality of work lies between the obsessive and the painstainking. Honeycomb shapes, landscape forms are figures inspired in geometry and nature.

By far, this is the most succesful show at Mina Dresden not only because of the sensitive quality of the pieces, but also by the care given to the presentation of the works.

Cecilia Nuín
curator

Cell Stemming by Blanka Amezkua

Organic patterns, and repetitive forms are evident in Blanca Amezcua’s mixed media work. Amezcua’s obsessiveness is apparent in objects like Fluffy Anemone an oval shape with hairy like shapes. These hairy elements recall filaments of botanical parts. The surface is filled with multicolor flowers, and stuffed toys of multiple shapes. Vibrant colors range from reds, and blues, to multiple shades of pink.

Another work, Kinetico is an embroidery made on fabric with a crochet, yellow frame refers to kinesthetic practice. Circles of various sizes sewn in blues, oranges, and reds form groupings of cells. Mirroring organic forms from the natural world, they recall cell stemming of espora like molecules with white spaces in between mitochondria fluids.

Iko, a cell division, is a breakdown of forms. An embroidery and crochet with a brown frame and spherical, red, pink, orange shapes depict viscera like figures recalling internal organs. An up side down torso of a female image, these abstract, womb like vesicles allude to vestigial forms.

La Lluvia by Josefina Jacquin

A commemorative piece, La Lluvia (Rain), 1992 created by Colombian artist Josefina Jacquin Bates addresses issues of resistance of Native American cultures in Latin America. This work is framed by the phrase 500 years of resistance, (500 anos de resistencia) around the edges with five small skulls interspersed in between. In the foreground are three female figures. Two of the figures with headdresses and green and purple necklaces are wearing strings around their hips. The middle figure has her eyes covered by hair on her face. The faces have an impassive expression and their eyes project a vacuous look. Elements like the necklaces, and strings along with their nudity connote that these are women belong to an Amazonian tribe. Their black, longhaired figures with brown colored skin contrast against the yellowish background. A sense of three dimensionally is achieved by the jagged lines contouring the surface of their bodies.. The hands are clasped across the abdomen and chest. The yellow background is covered with little skulls and tiny bones. These floating shapes enhance the idea of falling rain giving texture to the background. The title La Lluvia (The Rain) is a pun on the innumerable deaths of indigenist people in the last five hundred years. The sad look of these women’s faces with the rain of skulls falling on them comments on the decimated indigenist population. A vast majority of the native people during the Conquest died of contagious diseases. The natives had no resistance to diseases brought by the Spaniards. Women are the keepers of culture in indigenist societies. They are the story tellers in oral tradition and the ones that pass along knowledge.

Fabricated by Paz de la Calzada

The EnvironMENTAL Paradigm

María Adela Díaz
Blossom
Video Performance
Still, photo: Miguel Morales
2008

Talking green is in. The matter at hand is discerning whether we are talking about the environment or the color of money. Words such as sustainability have become cliché. Corporate media has seized an ecological issue and commercialized it for a profit. The EnvironMENTAL Paradigm exhibition explores models of expression in contemporary environmental art. The works in this exhibit include installation, photography, sculpture, and video performance.

Environmental art takes us back to Land Art’s movement of the late 1960's. From using a bulldozer to build the Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson, to embalming a shark in a fish tank by Damien Hirst in the1990’s, both artists utilized environmental elements as a medium for art’s sake.*

The question still remains as to what constitutes environmental art in the twenty first-century. How do artists tackle ecological art when we seem oblivious to the urgency of ecological implosion. Flora and fauna species are at the brink of extinction. Natural resources have become so tainted that these are endangering our own existence.

What kind of an environmental model is there to follow? The direction environmental art has taken is one of concern for ecological issues. Unlike the above artists, in this show, the artists’ approach is one of responsibility for the kind of materials that they use. This distinction allows artists to create inspiring works; not only because the materials serve as a medium, but they are also the end in itself.

Kin Li: Light sinks into the earth and is veiled nonetheless it shines forth. I Ching, 36 by Ana Labastida presents a light box with an image of a green, maple leaf in front a car in a Mexico’s City freeway. By juxtaposing the hovering leaf against the car, she calls attention to the contradiction between the use energy and the production of smog. Also, the leaf serves a symbol of hope to a city where one breathes an asphyxiating vapor. To name her piece, Labastida inspired herself in the I-Ching, or Books of Changes to reminds us that change is inevitable.

Blossom is a video performance created by Maria Adela Díaz. Dressed in yellow, she springs herself up from a trampoline in the middle of a flowering, wild radish field. Yellow, wild radish is an invasive species growing along Californian roads. This playful exercise is no child’s play. Díaz immerses herself into a serious act drawing attention to humans to be proactive towards the environment.

Artist Julie Poitras Santos in collaboration with marine scientist Jessica Muhlin, and photographer Pauline Angione created in suspension / a poetry of chance. To gather data on marine flora, numbered oranges are dispersed to study currents’ movement in the coast of Maine. Fluctuating between art and science, this interdisciplinary approach helps us appreciate nature in a deeper manner.

Jessica Resmond’s Grass Billboards show digital images of green lawns from Dolores Park on billboards in San Francisco. By displaying grass on advertisement boards, Resmond conflates ideas about green and urban context while subverting the use of corporate space. In a symbolic way, she cultivates land in urbanized sites.

In Fabricated, a work of spotty antlers, Paz de la Calzada made an artwork that can be interpreted as tree branches. In this manner, the artist contrasts aspects of nature and culture. By placing this work at a juncture between animal and botanical realm, de la Calzada alludes to the interdependence between fauna and flora.

Spilt Milk by Patricia Tinajero is a sculpture made of recycled milk cartons, and bamboo sticks. Using a quilt, and collage technique, she layers material to create a sculpture resembling a camera over a tripod. Like Labastida, Tinajero refers to transformation by painting a butterfly on its surface. By reusing materials that otherwise would end up in a landfill, she also comments on environmental activism.

In Greener Pastures, Hrafnhildur Sigurðardóttir depicts a cluster of islands forming an archipelago. Like Tinajero, Sigurðardóttir utilizes fabric as a recycled material. By stacking up pieces of clothing to shape forms, the artist juxtaposes images of idyllic islands against green algae. Sigurðardóttir refers to an environmental problem that arises from polluted waters surrounding these islands. This is a result from the impact of mass tourism.

Crónica del Naufragio (Chronicle of a Shipwreck), a film by Cristina Ferrández, presents a group of eight women building a boat’s frame on the foggy beach of Quebrantos, in Asturias, Spain. With the ocean as a backdrop, the film is a metaphor to the demise of our own existence. By using the allegory of a sinking ship, Ferrández alludes to our diluvial fate. This meditative piece is also a reference to global warming.

The works presented in The EnvironMENTAL Paradigm exhibit bring a sense of hope with the artists’ approach to art making. As innovators artists take the lead on creating art concerned with ideas pertaining to their milieu. Artists make a contribution playing a role as ecological activists. Concerned with ecological issues, they appeal to us to take a stance as active participants in conservation. They urge us to avoid actions that are in detriment of a nature we depend upon -- in an effort to save ourselves from annihilation. Artists, scientists, and the public just need to put their mind to it.

Kun Li by Ana Labastida

Ana Labastida
Kun LI:: Light sinks into the earth and is veiled, nonetheless it shines forth. I Ching 36
Photography, Light box
2002


Kun Li by Ana Labastida is a highlight from The Environmental Paradigm exhibition. Read essay above.