OPAQUE CONTEXT - hyper-fast photographic study of intervention in gallery with eyes closed
WITHIN THE ENEMY’S FIELD OF VISION SERIES, 2008
274 35mm slides documenting intervention in space. Five 35mm slideshow projectors.
I cancel the white cube and all the elements of representation with black polyethylene - windows, lights, walls, objects - minus the skylight . The space intervention is documented with 274 hyper-fast snapshots with the eyes closed.
Project for La Refaccionaria Gallery, Mexico City, 2008.
PRESS RELEASE:
La Refaccionaria Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo
is delighted to present:
Sensibile-en-General | Within The Enemy’s Field Of Vision Series
Opening Saturday 27th of September to 21th of October 2008, at 12:00 hrs. Until the 27th of October
La Refaccionaria presents Juan Pablo Macias solo show at Mexico City, “Sensible-en-General”, presenting 4 years of production and a site specific intervention in the gallery that closes the series “Within The Enemy’s Field Of Vision” (2004-08). This series is constituted by video-actions and in this occasion also by a site-specific intervention to the exhibit space. Articulated by the relation between representation system (as medium and as space), and affectivity (as that sensible-in-general that serves as substrata for language), the series is a critique of representation by means of its own tools, photography and video, abandoning all objective affirmation proper of the medium, by means of affective transits that intend to unstable its operativity. As the artist says:
“…These works premises take off from the fundamental encounter between the representation system and the subject as an affective substrata, by means of an attack to the photographic distance and to its consecutive narrative display. I formulated a series of encounters to unstable, boycott or cancel the relation between subject/object, in a way that it suffered a temporal interruption of its referential motif. I was looking for some instability of the medium to take it to some degree of anti-discursive aphasia…”
The artist activates in first person a succession of attacks to the photographic device – or video- and to the distance (time-space) that it produces between subject and object, by means of diverse tactics: in the first video, “Subjective Camera (structures of auto-suggestion)” (2004), Macias underlies fear and sublimation as feelings that articulate Occident’s approach to language. Afterwards, through a series of assemblages between the artist and the medium in which the representative distance becomes contiguity, as in the case of “History of the eye” (2005), where he blows a condom in front of the camera slowly canceling its depth of field, or spitting repeatedly to the cameras eye in “Spitting Machine” (2005).
Each action fixates a growing loss of visual coherence until the moment in which subject and camera become a unique vision machine (by malfunction), in which there are no more exclusions and divisions, like in “April 2005” (2005), and in “Headbanging with a camera attached to my head” (2005-06), where the camera is taped to the artists head registering his movements. Finally, against the machine, against representation, against the unilaterallity of discourse and the geography of this visual regime, the artist constructs a homemade bomb placing it at ten centimeters away from the video camera and in between two mirrors that multiply the image. He detonates it… paradoxically the camera survives … Sound Bomb (2006).
In this occasion Juan Pablo Macias develops further this grammar of vision in the gallery’s space, the space of representation by excellence, in which everything that appears becomes shown, explained, interpreted, celebrated, legitimated. The artist cancels the white cube and all the elements of representation (windows, lights, walls, objects, etc.), with black plastic. The space intervention is documented with 274 snapshots: Opaque context – hyper-fast photographic study of intervention in gallery with eyes closed – (2008). Inside of this intervention a video is projected: “Black polyethylene, windows, skylight, opaque context…“ (2008), a video work resulting from this intervention in which there is a repetitive fade-out (a black-out produced by the rolling down of the black plastic) that articulates the tape’s duration. An installation that seems to incubate the subject, locating it by blinding it, by means of an abandon of vision and distance…
…Here everything is contiguity; everything is an opaque context, a sensible-in-general that always remains out of field…
Juan Pablo Macías is a Mexican artist and curator living between Italy and Mexico City. He has shown his work collectively in shows like: Emergency Biennale in Chechnya, 10th Istanbul Biennial (2007); Suitcase-Illuminated, On Parellel Economies, at Musée d’Art Contemporain du Mal de Varne, Paris and P74 Center & Gallery in Ljubljana (2007); Self-Educations, National Center for Contemporary Art Moscow – NCCA (2006); Come Closer, Künstlerhuas Bethanien, Berlin (2005); Aparentemente Sublime, Museum of Modern Art - MAM, Mexico City (2003); Sala de Recuperación, Museo Arte Contemporáneo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2002).
Solo shows: Axon- Into the Reality, National Center for Contemporary Art Moscow – NCCA (2007); Everything turns, everything revolves, Arena México, Guadalajara (2006); Daily Staging with Gabriel Acevedo Velarde at Ciocca Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy (2005); Simplesmente elas Exalam, with Gabriel Acevedo Velarde at Leme Gallery, Sao Paolo Brasil (2005). In December 2008 he is presenting a 2-year project at the Cubo of Sala de Arte Públco Siqueiros –SAPS in Mexico City, along a historic publication of the death metal scene in Puebla City, in Mexico.
Galería la Refaccionaria Arte y Diseño - Bucareli 128 E-40.
Edificio Vizcaya. Col. Centro, México D.F. Tel.: 55120012 y 5512 5080.
Opened to the public through Monday to friday from 10 to 15 hrs. and from y 16 to 18.
Saturdays from 10 to 14 hrs.
Web: www.galerialarefaccionaria.com
E-mail: larefaccionaria@galerialarefaccionaria.com
