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The
exhibition Hybrid Cultures: works from Mexico City
and Montréal reflects a desire to show the
dimension, versatility and span of contemporary art stemming
from these mutual urban milieus by creating a network
of associative symbolism, imagery, problematics and desires
within the forum of this exhibition. Hybrid Cultures
groups together ten artists. Five artists live in Mexico
City: Eduardo Abaroa, Daniela Rossell, Melanie Smith,
Sofia Táboas, Pablo Vargas-Lugo, and five in Montréal:
Kevin Ei-ichi deForest, David Blatherwick, Kristine Friedmann,
Lauren Schaffer, Brad Todd.
These artists are assembled together because of their
similarities in approaches to art making and attitudes
as artists. They bridge different artistic practices and
conventions in their work thereby challenging the categorization
of the role of the artist within society. Many are involved
in polydisciplinary practices combining art making with
curating, writing, playing in bands and DJing. Their creative
output is diverse and spans a horizon difficult to contain.
Incorporated into their work are eclectic cultural references
such as "other" cultures, histories and sexual
norms along with popular trends found in music, fashion,
films, games and television. These references are floating
signifiers in their repertoire of symbols and beliefs,
mixing high and low in a way that is not so much shocking
as perversely disturbing. An expanded repertoire of media
including painting, photography, installation and sculpture
is intermixed in the artists' bodies of work. Materials
have a new found role in the formulation of the works
in the exhibition and the visitor will see the play of
"popular" verses "art" materials in
quixotic combinations of textures, colours, fabrics and
forms.
The works in Hybrid Cultures belong to an age of
"post-popular" culture. A kind of art that toys
with being content with its status of popular gadgetry
and yet wistfully echoes a lost "aura" reminiscent
of fin de siècle attitudes. Caught in a paradoxical
adolescence, the works refuse to abandon childish woes
while suffusing themselves within a framework of culturally
informed art making. The coy and sexual photographs of
Daniela Rossell and Kristine Friedmann are indicative
of a desire to challenge the representation of women with
humourous yet disturbing images of the female form frolicking
within the vegetable and nature world. David Blatherwick
reformulates the self portrait by using surprising materials
such as bubble gum, while Eduardo Abaroa concocts new
hybrid forms of humans, morphing the animal and plant
kingdom. Lauren Schaffer's post-minimalist sculpture,
castings of car parts and oversized diamonds in ceramic,
conflates the art object/commodity issue, a tactic which
can also be detected in Sofia Táboas' work wherein
she presents ready-made commodities as displays of human
decadence. Melanie Smith combines formalist concerns of
painting and representation in the coupling of photographs
of hectic Mexico City with cool abstract minimalist paintings.
Kevin Ei-ichi deForest also grapples with minimalist tendencies,
twisting it apart in the fabrication of abstract air "pillows"
vaguely suggestive of the human body. Brad Todd's romantic
paintings of destructive and melancholic mise en scène
represent the loss of definitive beliefs and spin out
of the present to carry in its swirl a pathos evocative
of late nineteenth century painting. Pablo Vargas-Lugo's
drawings of monsters as well as wax Rorschach test prints
sacrificed on painted crosses question perceptions and
the psychological landscape of human spirituality.
Hybrid Cultures: works from Mexico City and Montréal
attempts to illuminate the shaping of a contemporary fin
de siècle art and looks towards a future of hybrid
transformations that foreshadow what is certain to be
a remarkable next millennium. |
| Valérie
Lamontagne is a freelance art critic, curator and artist.
Her writings have been published in C Magazine,
Mix Magazine, Etc Montréal and Parachute.
She co-curated The Space Between II at the Saidye
Bronfman Centre (1995), Compact Abundance, co-curated
with Vida Simon at Articule Gallery (1996) and Hybrid
Cultures: works from Mexico City and Montréal
presented at OBORO (1997). She is presently undertaking
an M.F.A. in Painting at Concordia University. |
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