August 2007

Monday, August 27, 2007

Urban Recline: new work

Urban Recline:
new work by

Adriana Baltazar
Miguel Cortez

Opening Friday September 7 from 6pm-10pm
September 7 - October 6, 2007

Polvo begins the fall schedule by showcasing 2 local artists, Adriana Baltazar and Miguel Cortez. Even though their styles are different they find common ground in the influence of the urban environment, its surroundings and how this affects them.

Adriana Baltazar
A sincere goal of mine as an artist is to celebrate and document my time and surroundings in an effort to record history in the making. The late 18th c. French writer Sebastian Mercier recorded life in the streets of Paris in his day to day existence and has given the world a priceless view of a time and place we did not have to live in to know. He captured the type of things that slip out of the pages of history books. With our faces and digits fumbling over one of the plethora of gadgets available to us, I fear we put ourselves at risk as always to lose track of some irreplaceable gems. I feel compelled to record those things which we will undoubtedly miss only after they are finally gone. - Adriana Baltazar

Born in southwest Chicago, Adriana Baltazar has grown up to be a near hermit. By night, she is drawing away and by day working in an office to pay off art school debt. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. As a child she searched for stray pets to nurture and now it appears she is the stray. Find her wandering streets and woods seeking sublime inspiration and escape in vacant lots or other plots of dirt overridden with trees and foliage.

Miguel Cortez
Several years ago I did a series of paintings that dealt with imaginary aerial landscapes. With this new series of work I go to the opposite end and imagine microscopic environments plus imaginary abstract forms and shapes. For inspiration I looked at decaying textures that I came across such as found rusted and cracked objects, paint peeling off walls and buildings, oils stains on the pavement and other examples of urban/nature decay. - Miguel Cortez, August 2007

Miguel Cortez is an artist living in Chicago and born in Guanajuato, Mexico. He has studied at Columbia College and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Miguel also has exhibited his work for more than a decade in Chicago and elsewhere. Recent exhibitions include a show in Dallas at Mighty Fine Arts Gallery, also in Austin at Studio 107 Gallery, Pool Art Fair in Miami, Milwaukee International Art Fair, "Lo Romantico" at Glass Curtain Gallery and "Lies that Bill Gates told me: Exploring the Digital Divide" at VU Space in Melbourne, Australia. Miguel is also one of the founders of Polvo.

Polvo, www.polvo.org
1458 W. 18th St., 1R Chicago, IL 60608
773.344.1940
info(at)polvo.org

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

6:52 PM

ArtLies review of Ayanna Jolivet Mccloud

Ayanna Jolivet Mccloud showed a video earlier this year @ Polvo and ArtLies Magazine from Texas reviewed it in one of their past issues. I found the review online and pasted it below as well as a link to her video on google.

/MC
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Ayanna Jolivet Mccloud: Goofer Dust @ Polvo
- by Leah DeVun from ArtLies

Goofer Dust, an installation/performance by Ayanna Jolivet Mccloud at Diaspora Vibe Gallery in Miami in 2006, is now on display as a documentary video at Polvo in Chicago. For the original performance in Miami, Mccloud constructed a square box of earth in the center of the gallery. Computer projections, video and a troop of live roosters intersected the performance space; Mccloud also invited audience members to join her in a session of collective dreaming.

Participants lay face down on the floor, their bodies oriented toward the earthen box. According to Mccloud’s statement, she intended to evoke the spiritual—even supernatural potential of collective dreaming through which dreamers can predict the future, heal their bodies and escape the mundane nature of reality. The title of the work, as well as Mccloud’s emphasis on collectivity and dreaming, are a nod to the aesthetics and sensibilities of Voudou, a diasporic religion practiced predominantly in Haiti. Goofer dust is an ingredient in certain spells.

The staging of Mccloud’s installation brings to mind the visual structure of Voudou ceremonies, which organize adherents around a similar spatial focus—the poteau mitan or traditional peristyle—and a shared altered consciousness. The chickens that moved through the gallery represent the sacrificial food of the lwas, divinities in Voudou. They transmit the dream experience from one participant to another. The ritual composition and intensely theatrical nature of Voudou ceremonies lend themselves readily to performative adaptation, and Mccloud’s effort and ability to capitalize on such imagery and its meanings is impressive.

As a stand-alone video, however, Goofer Dust does not hold up quite so well. The camera offers a restricted and unsteady view of the space, making it difficult to see the projections that accompanied the performance. The piece is strictly a document rather than an interpretation of the event; as such, it takes little advantage of video as a medium. Even so, Goofer Dust manages to convey what a treat the original performance must have been. It also provides some insight into themes Mccloud has been exploring for several years now—a logical extension of earlier projects, which also draw connections between the human body, the natural and the supernatural.

Mccloud often borrows from Voudou, particularly through her use of vévés, traditional symbols of the lwas, which the artist removes from their ritual contexts. In Damballah Study, for example, she writes the snaky lines of a vévé onto a grassy field; in both Delete/Borrar/Efase and Crossroads, she constructs installations using vévés for specific lwas. In this respect, Mccloud follows a number of artists who have incorporated the ritual imagery of Voudou, Santería, Palo Mayombe and other diasporic religions into their artistic practice. Her performances and installations also resemble those of Juan Boza and Angel Suarez-Rosado, whose recreations of Santería altars similarly blur distinctions between ritual and artistic space, arguing for a suffusion of the spiritual into all aspects of life. Other recent works highlight the body as a potential site of physical and metaphysical movement.

In Walking, Mccloud’s body slowly vanishes into the spare landscape of a beach, suggesting the passage from one world to another. Emphasis on the transformative potential of the body brings to mind the photographs of Marta María Pérez, which unite Pérez’s naked body with orishas and firmas—Santería versions of lwas and vévés. Mccloud is also indebted to Ana Mendieta’s well-known work, which combines earthen mounds, Santería-inspired markings and the artist’s body to powerful effect. Mccloud’s methodology, however, suffers in one important respect: the symbols she borrows are not always sufficiently transfigured. One wishes that she would keep pushing form as much as gesture as she does successfully in Sky Crosses, which reinvents the Voudou crossroads by means of string stretched through treetops. But Mccloud seems well aware that merely tracing out vévés is no longer enough: her recent work represents a welcome effort to inject physicality and personality into projects that still convey spirituality and transcendence. In this regard, Goofer Dust documents a wonderful progression in an ongoing body of work.

5:14 PM

from Flavorpill

ECHELON is thought to be a worldwide government-run intelligence network — the big Big Brother. This group exhibition, on the other hand, is concerned with the unscrupulous, grainy, and creepy kind of digital spying available to governments and artists alike. Some use video directly, as in Patrick Lichty's "wristcam" prints of security sites at LaGuardia airport, as well as Gretel Garcia's brilliant, sculptural wall installation of small dome cameras arranged to spell "hope" in Braille. Others evoke the malevolent implications of a Patriot Act-era regime, including Annette Barbier and Drew Browning's floor-projected examination of library searches, and T.W. Li's documentary about an innocent man wrongly suspected of involvement in the 2005 London terrorist attacks. (AM)

http://chi.flavorpill.net

Thursday, August 16, 2007

7:25 PM

Echelon in Chicago Reader

Critic's Choice: Echelon: Who Is Watching You?
from the Chicago Reader

This show about surveillance opened the day before the U.S. House of Representatives approved expanded information-gathering powers for the executive branch. Among the sculptures, photos, drawings, and other works on exhibit is a beautiful, disturbing rug conceived by local artist Noelle Mason and woven by Mexican artists Jose Antonio Flores and Jonathan Samaniego. Made of red and green wool, Ground Control takes its dynamic pattern from a map of the U.S./Mexican border generated by Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer technology. The red denotes the patchwork of cultivated agricultural areas, most clustered in this country, while the green, mostly on the other side of the border, indicates arid, undeveloped land. Though the rug is lush, it depicts the site of much conflict and suffering based on economic inequality (Mason paid the two weavers the amount of money it would take for a Mexican family of four to cross the border illegally). This challenging work questions the boundaries between the aesthetic and the utilitarian, the decorative and the subversive. Another standout is a witty, engaging installation by Annette Barbier and Drew Browning in which the viewer is tracked by a motion-sensing camera while reading the titles of “suspicious” books projected on the floor. Among the other artists in the show are Elvia Rodriguez-Ochoa, Patrick Lichty, Gretel Garcia, and Finishing School. Through 9/1: Sat noon-5 PM or by appointment, Polvo, 1458 W. 18th, 773-344-1940. —Janina Ciezadlo

7:06 PM

‘The Whole World is Being Watched’

Exhibit expands on the art of surveillance, how it affects today’s world

by Jessica Del Curto
Extra News
Posted on 08-16-2007

When a number of crime cameras began popping up around Pilsen, Miguel Cortez, director of Polvo Art Gallery, found his idea for his latest exhibit.

“I thought I would reach out to other artists and have them react to what is going on,” he said.

The latest exhibit, “Echelon: Who is Watching You,” consists of various art pieces that relate to surveillance, both on a local and international level.

He said all of the artists portrayed surveillance as a negative thing in society.

One piece, created by Drew Browning and Annette Barbier, shows a list of library books projected onto the floor of the studio. These books have been flagged by the government at the Harold Washington Library. As the viewer walks past the artwork, an infrared camera picks up his or her image, placing it behind the text, and tracks whether he or she goes left or right.

Artist Noelle Mason paid Mexican artisans José Antonio Flores and Jonathan Samaniego to create a 6-by-8-foot rug that is a map of the California-Mexico border. Mason paid the artists what it would cost to bring a family across the border. The point, Cortez said, is to show that satellite tracking is also in existence. “You can access any point on Google Earth and access any building. The whole world is under surveillance,” he said.

Cortez said audience members can take with them what they like from the exhibit.

He hopes people at least gain some awareness of the fact that they are being watched everywhere they go. “They can analyze the good and bad of that,” he said. “It may solve crime in some cases, but you also lose your privacy.”

As far as Cortez is concerned, George Orwell got it right in his book 1984. “He predicted it too soon. Now it’s actually happening,” he said.