Hybrid Cultures: Works from Mexico City and Montréal
OBORO
Curator: Valérie Lamontagne
Vernissage: Saturday, April 19th at 4pm
The exhibition, Hybrid Cultures: works from Mexico City and Montréal reveals the similarities and particularities of how younger generations from two different urban milieus are developing art today. The artists included in this exhibition are similar in that many of them bridge and mix different artistic practices. Most are involved in writing and curating while still making art, while various mediums (such as painting, photography, installation and sculpture) often intertwine in their production. As well, both the artists from Montréal and Mexico City tend to identify with more than one cultural root and are interested in participating in a culture beyond a specific city or country.
Aesthetically, their work seduces by means of excessive brightness, colour, pathos, wit, humour, perversity, sexiness, intimacy and daring. These artists work with an urgency to popularize the art object – to make art with objects and imagery from easily accessible popular culture – in a way that could be characterized as “over the top.” Human concerns such as sexual conformity, the ethics of commodity goods, the myth of beauty, anxieties around violence, disease and the future of humankind are addressed from an iconic and often colourful, or at least attention grabbing manner. These artists do not claim to have the answers to the questions they pose but are rather content with phrasing a malaise existing in Mexico and Montréal today. They are tapping into a desire to make the codification of art more accessible, a move which could be described as sullying art, on the one hand, but also imbuing it with excessive social importance. This type of outsider art – art working through the discarded material of high culture – presents an interesting focal point for this present fin de siècle anxiety present in both cultures.
OBORO
Valérie Lamontagne is a freelance art critic, curator and artist. Her writings have been published in C Magazine, Etc Montréal and Parachute. She has curated a modest number of exhibitions, including The Space Between II at the Saidye Bronfman Centre in 1995 and Compact Abundance, co-curated with Vida Simon at Articule Gallery in 1996. She is presently working on an exhibition to take place in her apartment scheduled for whenever her place gets cleaned up.