Dreams and Realities : Visions from Taiwan and Cuba of a Post Cold-War World, Chi-Wen Gallery in collaboration with Peter Kalb and Joe Lin- Hill, at Art Basel in Hong Kong, from May 23rd - 26th, 2013.

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Performance Beyond Miami's Parties
by Paul David Young 12/06/11 Art in America.

The tenth edition of Art Basel Miami Beach was supposed to "reflect a shift toward expanded conceptual, performative and temporal gestures," according to a curatorial statement. But there was little performance at the main fair, nor at the satellite fairs and events, unless you count the parties.

However, two lecture-performances provided a valuable opportunity to experience two sharply contrasting uses of this very current art form: Hennessy Youngman's NADA-sponsored The History of Art Part 1 in the lobby of the Deauville Hotel on Dec. 1, and Ernesto Oroza's Architecture of Necessity at the Fluxus-inspired exhibition "Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds" at LegalArt, curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud, on Dec. 2. The lecture-performance is often an ironic institutional critique of suspect curatorial practices, museum politics or art history. Terence Koh's recurring Art History, for example, involves a rapid-fire series of images that he explains using incomprehensible babble.

Youngman is known for irreverent online videos that combine street talk and glib attacks on specialized art vocabulary, but History of Art Part 1 amounted to a sad commentary on the catchall of "art performance." After several sound checks, the bearded Youngman, wearing a red Spiderman baseball hat, khaki shorts, gold chains, a BET leather bomber jacket and ankle boots, took his seat between some potted palms and began to read as a video projected behind him. Soon he announced that part of the script was missing, disappeared for a while and returned, without any additional material.

Youngman's "history" began with the paper tiger of the artist as a mythic loner, a shaman "bringing magic into the world." He railed briefly against the "MFA industry" of art education for producing "a creative class more like a search engine," though, to the extent that he completed his performance, it was clearly itself a product of Google. He didn't get very far before leaning into some racial comments about the crowd, a theme reprised throughout the performance. "Talking to a bunch of white people in the lobby is kind of weird. I need a lot of alcohol to cope with that." Later, he said he saw "four brown people here" and described the audience as a "sea of milk with some chocolate chips in it."

His refutation of the artist as lone protagonist was a belabored drug joke. He claimed that many historical figures, perplexingly mostly not from the history of art (the Incas, Pizarro, Thomas Edison, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Freud, Richard Pryor), had achieved something not because of "divine Providence" but because they had a "secret ally." Then he trotted out pictures of work by Donald Judd and Carl Andre, facetiously asserting that they made their breakthroughs with the help of cocaine.

At this point, Youngman, bored, abandoned the lecture, turned off the video projection, and spent the rest of his time walking among the crowd, asking audience members general questions. "Are you an artist? A collector?" "Why are you here?" He warned the crowd, "Don't come to NADA if you're an artist because you'll leave very depressed." Youngman didn't explain why that might be true. (In fact, the NADA fair was more vibrant than the main fair.)

Approaching one young woman, he inquired about the quality of his performance. "It's pretty boring, right?" The woman sheepishly admitted, "A little . . . " to which Youngman replied, "Should I just play music?"

He announced, "I'm going to keep doing this until you guys leave. This is called performance art." Indeed, the eager crowd that had gathered was almost entirely gone by the time Youngman stopped the in-crowd interviews. The ending was hardly noticed by the people in the lobby who had wandered off to talk or drink the free Grolsch beer. To paraphrase Youngman, if this is performance art, it does require a lot of alcohol to make it tolerable.

By contrast, the unironic Ernesto Oroza, a Miami-based artist who resided in Cuba until four years ago, took his lecture entirely seriously, at least until he set fire to a pencil using live electric wires attached to a plastic sandal and then tried to operate a fan connected to a rotary telephone.

The pencil ignition was the illuminating conclusion to Oroza's exploration of Cuban domestic innovation in response to the shortages and regulations of the Castro regime. Oroza was pleasantly low key, showing and describing rather than opining or advocating. An artist working with the ephemerality and low-tech predisposition of Fluxus, the raven-haired Oroza fingered his black plastic glasses, while operating his laptop and reading from a folded typed script that he had removed from his pocket.

Oroza explained how Cuban Marxism turns home ownership into a game of cat and mouse. With strict regulation on property ownership and construction, Cubans assert ownership piecemeal, establishing a stairway or extending the floor plan like a tendril to enclose a nearby freestanding wall. You can't build a stairway, so you build ascending platforms that that functions as such, but is nonstandard enough to escape prohibition.

With a slideshow illustrating vernacular Cuban architecture, Oroza showed the absurd but delightful effects of this system. He illustrated its transformative potential through photographs of strange building fragments that he described as "the potential house." A wrought iron handrail of an exterior staircase, breathtakingly irregular, had been created to avoid appearing to be a handrail. It curved in beautiful, organic curls, folding in, one on the other, not a stairway railing after all, but a primal kind of sculpture, site-specific and expressive of an individual will to overcome the impossible.

Oroza considered this "architecture of necessity" to be an instance of the total Cuban social adaptation to the island's economic isolation, the most famous example of which is the country's bizarrely well-preserved fleet of 1950s cars. For Oroza, this Cuban resourcefulness engenders a "pre-cultural sense of eating and sleeping," a state that seemed momentarily desirable.

Oroza's finale coaxed out the showman in him. Installed on the wall in the exhibition space of the superbly installed "Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds" was Oroza's black plastic sandal with two live wires protruding from it. Oroza placed a graphite pencil across the live wires and it burst into flames. He repeated the trick, explaining that this was a common practice in Cuba where there are no matches. Smokers set pencils on fire with electricity to light their cigarettes. (Don't try this at home.) It was a vivid, comic illustration of human perseverance and a nice bit of stage pyrotechnics. After the final explosion, Oroza installed the burnt pencils in a row atop the electrical conduit feeding the socket, where they remain until the exhibition closes, Jan. 31.

Light a fire with your house. Redrawing LegalArt's building. Electrical system, pencil, plastic sandal, text on wall, action. 2011. © Kerry McLaney

Cintas Foundation Finalists Exhibition for the Emilio Sanchez Award in the Visual Arts, Miami, US.

Moral Modulor (from Architecture of Necessity: 1997-2008). 120 slides and cut, 2008
Updating City (theorem). Miami, 2008. Founded metal bars chairs and monobloc plastic chairs.

Reading Room @ Julius Caesar
3311 W. Carroll Ave. Chicago, IL 60626
organized by Sean Ward
http://juliuscaesarchicago.org/reading.html

Light a fire with your house. Redrawing LegalArt's building. Electrical system, pencil, plastic sandal, text on wall, action. 2011 (Left).
Moral Modulor's Drawings Project "When anthropometric dimensions become a metaphor for moral dimensions", newspaper, cut 2011 (center)
Potential House. From Architecture of Necessity, 2008 (right).

"Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds" LegalArt, Miami. Curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud. Press release
"Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds" revisits the liberated attitude towards the creative process that defines the Fluxus movement. This project coincides with significant exhibitions happening at MOMA, NY; the Grey Art Gallery; NYU and at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, in collaboration with Performa 2011. This leads us to reflect on the similar attitudes between Fluxus actionists and a younger generation of artists as well as the socio-economic context in which these responses arise.

The title of this exhibition makes reference to a piece by composer John Cage, a notable influence on the Fluxus work of Lithuanian-born artist George Maciunas. Maciunas (1931-1978) organized the first Fluxus event in 1961 at the AG Gallery in New York City and the first Fluxus festivals in Europe. The Fluxus art movement in the 1960's and 1970's was characterized by a strongly Dadaist attitude, promoting artistic experimentation mixed with social and political activism. Often celebrated anarchistic change, Fluxus members avoided any limiting art theories and spurned pure aesthetic objectives. Their activities resulted in events or situations often called Aktions (works challenging the definition of art) and included performances, guerilla or street theater and concerts of electronic music, many of them similar to what in America were known as Happenings.

In the spirit of the Fluxus tradition, Omar Lopez-Chahoud has invited local and international artists, collaboratives, situationists, and curators to present projects in the form of publications, events, discussions, performances, situations, and other actions. These groups and individuals will activate the space in a way similar to the Happenings of the Fluxus Movement, inspired by an anti-art and anti-consumer enthusiasm. Participants in this exhibition include: Augurari Editions, Rodolfo Andaur, Hackworth Ashley, Spring Break, Monserrat Rojas Corradi, Cat Dove, Viking Funeral, Andrea Galvani,  Jay Hines, Scott Hug, Karlo Ibarra, Carlos Irijalba, Brookhart Jonquil, Jason Keeling, Kristin Korolowicz, Liz Magic Laser, Nicolas Lobo,  Gean Moreno, Richard Mosse, Ernesto Oroza, Gaston Persico, Manny Prieres, Print and Paste Collective (FAU), Megan Riley, Tom Scicluna, Joaquin Segura, SOMA, Natika Soward, Lara Stein Pardo, Suzanne Stroebe, Third Streaming/Yona Baker, Cecilia Szalkowicz, TM Sisters, Pinar Yolacan and others.

Omar Lopez-Chahoud has made use of his LegalArt residency as a lab for ideas, strategies and questions that organically shape the content of this exhibition. This project, like Cage's composition, creates a potential space for creative energy and responses, facilitating a fertile dialog with the community outside of the traditional gallery venue. Publications produced by artists, curators, and art organizations will be available for research on the second floor of LegalArt. The exhibition continues on the fourth floor with multimedia installations and performances.

Light a fire with your house. Redrawing LegalArt's building. Electrical system, pencil, text on wall, plastic sandal, action. 2011. © Kerry McLaney

Light a fire with your house. Redrawing LegalArt's building. Electrical system, pencil, plastic sandal, text on wall, action. 2011. © Kerry McLaney

Rethinking home from a pragmatic and criminal perspective. I am using the electrical system to "redrawing" the house. The action is connected with thousands of gestures individules that reimagine the urban infrastructures.

(detail) Light a fire with your house. Redrawing LegalArt's building. Electrical system, pencil, plastic sandal, text on wall, action. 2011

Potential House. From Architecture of Necessity, 2008 (right).

Moral Modulor's Drawings Project "When anthropometric dimensions become a metaphor for moral dimensions", newspaper, cut, 2011

Tabloids, 2008-2011 www.thetabloid.org

DOMESTIC ANIMAL GHOSTS

Curated by Gean Moreno

Waiting List, Mestna Galerija, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Curated by Yuneikis Villalonga, Elvis Fuentes and Glexis Novoa

{besps}waitinglist{/besps}{besps_c}0||Agua by Ernesto Oroza{/besps_c}

Time and transition in Contemporary Cuban Art
On View at Mestna Galerija Ljubljana
December 18, 2006 – January 15, 2007
Press Preview: Monday, December 18
11:00 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

Ljubljana, Slovenia – December 6, 2006 –- Leading cultural institution Mestna Galerija Ljubljana will present Waiting List: Time and transition in Contemporary Cuban Art, the first exhibition of Cuban art held in Slovenia, from December 18, 2006 until January 15, 2007. Organized by Mestna Galerija Ljubljana, and curated by Elvis Fuentes (New York) and Yuneikys Villalonga (Havana) with Glexis Novoa (Miami) acting as guest curator, this exhibition showcases the work of over 40 artists and groups that have contributed to the Cuban Art Renaissance since the 1980s. A special section of Cuban Performance Art of 1980s will feature documentation and objects utilized by artists in their works and never before shown in Europe.
This grouping of diverse and multi-media works -- by Cuban artists from the island and abroad working in photography, installation, video, painting, sculpture, and other media -- addresses the idea of time as a key subject in Contemporary Cuban Art. Productive journeys and leisure, aging and decaying, boredom and stress are particularly expressed through the personal experiences of the artists within the context of the Revolution, as well as the migration experience. “The Revolution has been a symbolic intervention on Cuban Time. In return, time has shaped discourses of and on the Cuban Revolution… They (artists) have metaphorically recorded some of the tensions in the cultural, social and political landscape of the past two decades”, said curators. Other recurring themes within the works are the role of art in society, as well as the position of the artist as an agent of change or mere spectator; and both the loss and gains of the historical process that they all have lived in. 
Among artists are performer Leandro Soto and conceptualist Gustavo Pérez Monzón, protagonists of the groundbreaking exhibition Volumen I (1981), a turning point in Cuban art. Also are María Magdalena Campos Pons, Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas, Glexis Novoa, Segundo Planes, and Lázaro Saavedra, included in the exhibition Kuba O.K. (1990) held at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, which opened a door for Cuban art in Europe. Antonio Eligio Fernández (Tonel), Arturo Cuenca, Juan-Sí González, José A. Toirac, Tania Bruguera, and groups like Art.De., Arte Calle, La Campana, and Provisional complete the selection of 1980s with the famous Baseball Game (1989), in which artists, critics and curators, tired of official censorship, devoted to the Cuba’s national pastime. 
Saavedra and René Francisco Rodríguez were the link between this innovative generation and the next, as they taught at the Higher Institute of Art and were instrumental in the endurance of experimentation and in the foundation of groups ENEMA and DUPP. Among younger artists are Carlos Garaicoa, Raúl Cordero, Yoan Capote, Beverly Mojena, El Soca & Fabian and others. Waiting List also presents Ernesto Oroza’s collection of functional objects produced by ordinary people during the deepest economic crisis in recent Cuban history, the so-called Special Period of 1990s. Tony Labat, César Trasobares, Coco Fusco and Ernesto Pujol form a strong counterpart of this innovative spirit in the art of Cuban exile.

Pavel Acosta, Aglutinador, Glenda León Arévalo, Ritual Art.De, José Ángel Vincench Barrera, Saidel Brito, Tania Bruguera, Arte Calle, Yoan Capote, Nilo Castillo, Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas, Raúl Cordero, Arturo Cuenca, Fernando Rodríguez and Francisco de la Cal, Ángel Delgado, Felipe Dulzaides, ENEMA, Sandra A. Ceballos & Espacio, El Soca & Fabian, Antonio Eligio Fernández (Tonel), Coco Fusco, Carlos Garaicoa, Juan-Sí González, Lázaro A. Saavedra González, Tony Labat, Alejandro López, José Luis Alonso Mateo, Aldo Damián Menéndez, Beverly Mojena, Antonio Núńez, Liudmila Velasco & Nelson, Glexis Novoa, Abel Oliva, Ernesto Oroza, Alain Pino, Segundo Planes, La Campana María Magdalena Campos Pons, Provisional, Ernesto Pujol, Rigoberto Quintana, Ramírez, René Francisco Rodríguez, Joel Rojas, Leandro Soto, José A. Toirac, César Trasobares, Harold Vázquez

Photo:Alesh Houdek

Curatorial Statement by Rene Morales

The work of Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza revolves around two central interests: the social forces that shape the urban landscapes, and the idea of tapping into what they term the “preexisting infrastructures” that they have at their disposal as artists working on a project-to-project basis.

When they were approached by MAM to participate in NWM2010, they identified the museum’s tradition of publishing “gallery notes” for each exhibition and proposed folding the content of the brochure (curatorial essays, a calendar of events, sponsors’ logos, a survey questionnaire, etc.) into the ongoing series of tabloid newspapers that they produce as part of their commissions; they consider these publications to be the primary elements of their projects.

The lower expense of the tabloid format allows for the publication of three 16-page editions (one for each month of the exhibition), which will be distributed at several locations throughout the city.

<<click on the image for more views>>

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Bhakti Baxter, Nicolas Lobo, Gean Moreno, Daniel Newman, Ernesto Oroza, and Gavin Perry will be featured in the exhibition, Spit-Polishing a Starless Sky/Outer Space, at Charest-Weinberg Gallery, from September 12 through October 5, 2009. The opening reception will be on September 12 from 6pm to 9 pm at 250 NW 23rd Street, Space 408, Miami, FL 33127.

The exhibition is comprised of two different exhibitions that have been superimposed without any attempt to make them cohere. Two sets of information have simply been brought together, and the resulting form of the exhibition will be determined by the very dynamics of their interaction.

The first exhibition, Spit-Polishing a Starless Sky, is made up of black or nearly-black paintings by Bhakti Baxter, Daniel Newman and Gavin Perry. In the work of all these painters, the black monochrome is entwined with references that belong in cultural spheres that exist far away from formalist concerns. In Baxter’s case, the black paintings double as images of macroscopic phenomena and have a scientific flavor. In Perry’s work, the black monochrome is literally the high-end side of paintings that also trade in lowbrow referents and objects, like cheap rugs and souped up cars. With Newman, the black glaze is all process. He has covered over 200 found paintings with black, turning a gesture characteristic of iconophobia into a delirious flow of production. In a sense, in the work of all these painters, two sets of information are already blended. Each of their works becomes a stand-in for the overall structure of a double-exhibition with incompatible or competing halves.

The second exhibition, Outer Space, titled after a 1999 short film by Peter Tscherkassky, will be made up of sculptural proposals by Nicolas Lobo and Giancarlo Sardone, and Ernesto Oroza and Gean Moreno. Each of these collaborative projects begins with elements provided by the technologies, conventions and infrastructure that form the invisible materiality of our social space. Working through all the engineering problems and ontological recoding that rendering a virtual artifact in actual space brings, Lobo has collaborated with terrazzo mason Sardone to produced a real-life double of a standard bench that can be found ready-made in the design program SketchUp. As the bench took shape, its proportions began to feel slightly off due to some distortion caused the Sketchup rendering engine. What looked like a perfectly bland bench on screen takes on an uncanny air in our physical space. Oroza and Moreno will use the tabloid, of the sort found throughout the city’s neighborhoods, to create both a “catalog” and an ornamental wallpaper pattern from forms determined by the exhibition itself that will, in turn, activate the supposed neutral walls of the space.

All the artists in the exhibition are part of Miami’s burgeoning scene. They have all exhibited their work internationally and are represented in the collections of major museums. This will be the first time their work is shown at Charest-Weinberg Gallery, whose reputation continues to grow as Miami’s premier venue for emerging art.

Ficciones postmodernas en Miami
Domingo, 09.27.09
By ADRIANA HERRERA
Especial/El Nuevo Herald
Charest-Weinberg Gallery es un espacio artístico abierto al riesgo inteligente, a exploraciones tan inusuales en su método como coherentes. Prueba de ello es el montaje de dos muestras paralelas curadas por Gean Moreno y yuxtapuestas en la exhibición Spit-Polishing a Starless Sky/Outer Space. El hecho de que ninguna de las piezas esté identificada --pese a que algunas poseen títulos-- obedece a la naturaleza de un proyecto que fusiona la autoría individual y la anónima o colectiva, y también lo decorativo y lo documental; la reproducción virtual y la mecánica; y las estrategias propias del diseño o de la literatura, con el arte. Al explorar en el espacio las intersecciones de las piezas de Daniel Newman, Bhakti Baxter y Gavin Perry --que conforman la primera exhibición, Spit-Polishing a Starless Sky-- con las de Gean Moreno, Ernesto Oroza, y Nicolás Lobo -que conforman la segunda, Outer Space-- se logra una gran instalación colectiva, que rebasa los límites conceptuales claves.
El catálogo de esta exhibición doble, apilado a la izquierda de la entrada de la galería, evoca las imágenes que Félix González-Torres imprimió en papel periódico, alterando la relación entre las obras y el espectador. Pero aquí estamos ante otras implicaciones. Al desdoblar el catálogo descubrimos dos hojas impresas en tabloide que documentan cada muestra. La pila está colocada sobre una pieza instalada en el suelo y justamente hecha con seis copias extendidas del diagrama de dos cuadrados y un rectángulo duplicados que Oroza y Moreno obtuvieron de la impresión en prensa del oscuro ``reverso'' de las obras de Baxter, Newman y Perry que conforman Spit-Polishing a Starless Sky. Estas alcanzan a distinguirse por la otra cara de la hoja, aunque son pinturas ``negras'', casi monocromáticas. La pintura de Newman forma parte de una serie de cuadros encontrados que ``canceló'' cubriéndolas casi por completo de negro ``en un gesto característico de icono-fobia'', según Moreno. La bella pieza colgante de Perry está hecha sobre una alfombra rectangular común, a la que recubrió de negro. Light Tunnel de Baxter es un foco luminiscente rodeado de ``un cielo sin estrellas'' --como el título--, construido con trazos circulares negros, que indagan en formas reveladas por la ciencia.
En la segunda hoja del catálogo aparece por una cara del periódico el segundo diagrama de Oroza y Moreno: lo tomaron de una documentación sobre diseños populares realizada en Little Haiti, en Miami: era la fachada de una casa decorada con una simulación de piedras en la calle 79. Al reproducir la imagen a tamaño tabloide en papel se convierte en un patrón geométrico que puede multiplicarse y que usan como matriz de trabajo para producir inquietantes intersecciones. El cruce de diseños traspasado al arte, por ejemplo. Tampoco es azar que en el anverso de esta hoja aparezcan el supuesto prólogo del editor a la última novela de E.T.A. Hoffmann, y el modelo del banco que Nicolás Lobo construyó con Giancarlo Sardone tras tomarlo, como un objeto encontrado, del programa, de Google Earth, que se usa para hacer modelos virtuales arquitectónicos y para otros usos en la red, pero no para construir objetos reales.
Junto al traspaso de ese modelo virtual a un medio mecánico como el papel impreso (y a su real existencia en el espacio interior en la galería), el espectador ve, justo en frente del catálogo apilado, que con la hoja de periódico del patrón de piedras se ha empapelado por completo la pared del fondo y media pared lateral, y que el efecto de la multiplicación es asombroso: esa imagen que documentaba una intervención de decoración popular, funciona ahora como un bello papel de colgadura que duplica su efecto, además, en el espejo de una de las puertas de la galería. Pero no sólo eso: en uno de los lados de la pared empapelada está colgado el Túnel de luz de Baxter, y la impresión es que el diagrama y la pintura forman una sola obra continua. Esa fusión es tan perfecta como transgresora: la instalación sofistica el diseño espontáneo anónimo hasta usarlo como una perfecta decoración de interiores, pero también hace de la piedra papel, vuelve el objeto frágil y perecedero, del mismo modo en que disuelve la noción de autoría. Ese hilo de continuidad que tiene como base los mecanismos de reproducción y la apropiación de diseños prefabricados tanto como la incorporación de piezas que exploran otros modos de cancelación de límites se prolonga en el texto del catálogo. Hoffman, juez de oficio, pero también ilustrador, tenor y autor romántico de los Cuentos fantásticos que encandilaron a Offenbach, quien los llevó a la ópera, compuso en 1919 su extraña novela The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr. Como explica el lúdico prólogo se trata de la autobiografía de un gato, que por descuido editorial, salió impreso sin notar que incorporaba las pilas de hojas de otro libro sobre un compositor, con las cuales el gato Murr jugaba. El ``editor'' pide disculpas por las yuxtaposiciones --paralelas a los ``descuidos'' de estas dos muestras fusionadas en los que una obra se incorpora a otra sin que nadie se tome el cuidado de colocar los créditos de identificación precisos--, así como por los juegos de sentido que resultan de determinados errores tipográficos. El texto habla directamente al lector, pidiendo su ``discreción'' y es auto-reflexivo en torno al proceso editorial, con una humorística ironía que permite introducirse en su estructura impredecible (por su naturaleza felina), y discontinua que la convierte en ``una de las primeras ficciones posmodernas''. Resulta semejante en sus osadas mezclas de autores a esta exhibición que funde las pinturas en negro de una muestra, con los desbordamientos de espacios y de usos insólitos de la reproducción de la otra. El juego referencial del catálogo es interminable: Hoffmann se apropiaba, ya desde el título, de la cervantina novela de Lawrence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, que contiene ese mismo libro dentro del libro, asteriscos en vez de ciertas palabras, una página totalmente negra, y la virtud compartida con esta exhibición --tan pulcra en su instalación minimalista que pasaría por decorativa-- de expandir los límites mentales. •
adrianaherrerat@aol.com
`Spit-Polishing a Starless Sky/Outer Space' de Daniel Newman, Bhakti Baxter, Gavin Perry, Gean Moreno, Ernesto Oroza, y Nicolás Lobo en Charest-Weinberg Gallery, 250 NW 23 St., Space 408. Hasta el 5 de octubre.

http://gallerydiet.com/2012/03/21/khamsa-izm-organized-by-nicolas-lobo/

Khamsa-izm

Gallery Diet
November 30th 2012—January X, 2013
Organized by Nicolas Lobo

An exhibition in which the moral circuit between the eye and the hand is traveled.

Featuring work by: Kenneth Tam, Martijn Hendriks, Alyse Emdur, Harun Farocki, Bill Daniel, Peter Bagge, Unica Zurn, Daniel Newman, Emmett Moore, and The Tabloid by Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza.

Can the eyes project evil? What does the act of looking do to affect the things we look at? If the eyes function as a deterministic mechanism for the actions taken by the hands, it seems to be a very difficult mechanism to negotiate.  The works included in this show interrogate the moral tension between the eyes, the hand or may be simply a result of the pressures of both.

One can sit on Emmett Moore’s bench: a toppled fiberglass trashcan in the center of the exhibition space.  The trashcan is painted a saturated aqua color and its design suggests origins in a theme park or outdoor mall from the mid 20^th century.  Describing an act of delinquency by a hand in an environment we can imagine with wry familiarity, the seating sets the tone for what is to be viewed from it.  For example, in Harun Faroki’s filmEye/Machine, we see images taken by the machines of war themselves; the pictures don’t quite fit the rubric of propaganda. Instead the film suggests a policy of image-making that may have eclipsed the other functions of armed conflict.

Where we can see these ethical traces we may be tempted to follow the morality described by them.  First we should consider not only the images but also how they are seen. What ethical modifiers are the viewing conditions?  Can the eye inflect these hand marks with its own possibly deviant urges?

The Espace Fondation EDF spotlights the so-called simplicity of electric energy through an original exhibition open to the world...
From Wednesday 14 November 2012 to Sunday 17 March 2013
Espace Fondation EDF
Curator: Alain Beltran. Directeur de recherche au CNRS

Chains
4.11 - 14.11. 2012

INVENTORY Archive - www.inventorylimited.com
Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2012. Security Building, Downtown Miami

Mapping the Design World Meeting Point at Reciprocity. Curated by Max Borka

The Work of Ernesto Oroza will be highlighted at the Mapping the Design World Meeting Point at Reciprocity, the Design Biennial for Social Innovation in Liege, Belgium, from October 5 through October 28 2012, and will also feature in the accompanying MAP-Mapping the Design World magazine – focusing on some 100 examples of (Do) Good Design from an equal number of countries.

http://www.designliege.be/fr-287-mapping_the_design_world.html

Cultural Consortium Visual and Media Artists Fellowship Exhibition 2012

"Universal" A video program curated by Grela Orihuela

Critical Strategies of Post-Utopian Cuban Art (Cuba-United States). Curated by Adriana Herrera
Houston Fine Art Fair, Sept. 15 – 18, 2011.

The exhibition—featuring Consuelo Castañeda, Rubén Torres Llorca, Glexis Novoa, Ernesto Oroza and Gladys Triana—includes pieces (or re-mades) belonging to the period in which they lived on the island, and challenged the hegemonic system, along with artworks that are particularly strong in the production of a critical—and political, in a more general sense—vision of the United States. The exhibition is curated by Adriana Herrera, Miami-based independent curator and critical writer, and sponsored by Hardcore Contemporary Art Space, located in booth 602.

Inventory Series 02

Soul Does Matter

Curated by Thais Fontenelle
INVENTORY SERIES 02: 
SOUL DOES MATTER.
on view NOV 26 — DEC 4/2011
Vernissage Nov 26 7 — 11p
Buena Vista Bldg. 
180 NE 39 Street, #120
Design District, Miami

“Four minutes, thirty-three seconds”

Curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud
LegalArt, Miami.

La Otra, arte contemporáneo
21 al 26 de octubre 2011
Inauguración: Viernes, 21 de octubre, 8 PM
Horario General: Sábado 22 al Miércoles 26 de octubre, 11 AM - 8 PM
Domingo 23 de octubre, 11 AM - 6 PM
Evento de cierre: Miércoles 26 de octubre, 8 PM - 2 AM
Dirección: Edificio Panauto, Avenida Caracas con Calle 26, esquina sur oriental (parqueadero privado)
www.laotraproyectos.com

Pawnshop proprietors Julieta Aranda (in bowler) and Anton Vidokle, Ludlow Street, New York 2007.

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Pawnshop at Thessaloniki Biennial
18 September–18 November 2011

Junge Szene Kuba
Pasinger Fabrik. Munich, 10.06.2011 - 24.07.2011.
Curated by Siegfried Kaden.

Enter the Nineties
MIAMI-DADE PUBLIC LIBRARY SYSTEM
June 16 - September 13, 2011
2nd floor exhibition space, Main Library, 101 W. Flagler Street, Miami
Reception: Thursday, June 16, 7-8:30pm
With special performances and a 14-foot inflatable moon courtesy of
MARILYN GOTTLIEB-ROBERTS and THE END
Read review by Anne Tschida

Visual | Dance | visual art & dance collaboration
Curated by Glexis Novoa & Heather Maloney at Inkub8; Wynwood, December 1-5, 2010.

OFF THE RECORD at Edge Zones Art Center-Miami

I INTERNATIONAL CARIBBEAN TRIENNIAL
Santo Domingo 2010
1st September to the 24th October 2010
more info >

A Survey of Contemporary Art. July 16 - Agosto 15, 2010
Serendipity. Co-curated by Juan Delgado Calzadilla, Elvia Rosa Castro, and Nelson Herrera Ysla.

NEW WORK MIAMI 2010
July 18 through October 17, 2010

“No Soul For Sale - Festival of Independents,” Tate Modern, London (The Suburban/Milwaukee International), May 14-16, 2010

Upcoming: Catastrophe ? Quelle Catastrophe ? - Manif d’art – The Québec City Biennial
Curator: Sylvie Fortin

www.manifdart.org

Sujetos invisibles at Museo Tamayo, Mexico. Nov, 2007. Info here

Proyecto Circo en la II Semana de video Iberoamericano. February 23 -27/ 2010 @ La Nave Spacial
www.lanavespacial.com
Plaza del Pelícano, 4. Local 1.
41003 - Sevilla

PROYECTO HABITAR

Spanish Cultural Center Montevideo.
Curated by Luisa Espino
February 10th - April 10th 2010

Espacio Provisional. Dark Fair at the Swiss Institute 2008

Espacio provisional at Milwaukee International Art Fair 2008

Ernesto Oroza will be represented by Alonso Art.
Also he will participate at Project Room: Large Sculptures, and La Habana Pavilion: Two Visions of Cuba

Alonso Art PHOTO MIAMI 2008

Miami Noir at Invisible Export,NY, Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza.

Alonso Art at PhotoMiami 2009

Visionary Drawing Building
Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza.

NOWHERE/NOW/HERE Exhibition: Laboral Centro de Arte. Download invitation

Curators: Roberto Feo & Rosario Hurtado (El Último Grito), London / Berlin

Miami International Art Fair, January/2010
A Music Performance & Interactive Art Happening Preview event for the Miami International Art Fair (MIA)

Rent Electricity Gas at 380 NW 24^th Street

On behalf of Terri and Donna, Miami based curator Agatha Wara has set up a curious space called RENT ELECTRICITY GAS (a title borrowed from a Martin Kippenberger artwork). Featuring artworks in the form of seats and benches by Jim Drain, Nick Lobo, Ernesto Oroza and a young German artist Phillip Zach the space’s main function is as a bar. When asked “why a bar?”, Wara simply replied “ because what is the point of making more exhibitions?”

TIME + TEMP: Surveying the Shifting Climate of Painting in South Florida [More info here]
Nov. 16, 2009 – Jan. 10, 2010
Opening Reception: Fri., Nov. 20, 6-9 pm
Art and Culture Center of Hollywood
1650 Harrison St.
Hollywood, FL 33020
954. 921. 3274

Art Baselita Mama's Little Girl at Ede Zones. Curated by Glexis Novoa. More info here.

TIME + TEMP: Surveying the Shifting Climate of Painting in South Florida

Night Shift
Sleepless Night at Bass Museum of Art and Collins Park 11/7/09

CCE Miami presents Proyecto Habitar
From Oct 16th through Nov 25th, 2009
Raúl Cárdenas / Torolab. White Noise. 2001. Still
Opening reception: Friday, October 16th, 2009. 8:00 p.m.
Location: Centro Cultural Español. 800 Douglas Road, Suite 170. Coral Gables, FL 33134
Dates: From October 16th through Nov 25th, 2009
Curator: Luisa Espino

Since the sixties, cities have changed at a dramatic pace. This has been due in large part to real estate and financial interests, disconnected from collective needs. This deep restructuring has affected both demography and socio-economic configurations. The quality of life within each growing sector of the population has been compromised.

At the end of the Twentieth Century, while some neighborhoods deteriorated, others regenerated socially via occupation by the upper class and so generating a rapid rise in the economic value. Every year, more and more people are displaced from their homes because of abandonment of neighborhoods, land expropriation and re-zoning, rate rises and costs that outstrip salaries. The constant pressures of urban decay, land speculation, the establishment of ghettos, the influx of international migrants or the homeless from neighboring regions makes as essential review of our ideas of habitability.

A group of artists has rallied against these situations, fostering a counter culture where contemporary city decadence is approached from different angles. They challenge housing problems, the use of public space, land speculation, urban settlements on the fringe of legality, enforced desertion of neighborhoods and buildings, urban decay and the formation of ghettos. They demand a new approach to homelessness.

Individual and collective artists such as Raúl Cárdenas/Torolab, Santiago Cirugeda/Recetas Urbanas, Democracia, Gean Moreno, Ernesto Oroza, Juan Carlos Robles and Todo por la Praxis, illustrate the following cases in Madrid, Seville, Miami, Tijuana and Havana.

En un momento en el que las grandes ciudades de los países desarrollados compiten entre sí por convertirse en iconos de modernidad y sus autoridades invitan a conocidos arquitectos a diseñar edificios emblemáticos, está teniendo lugar en paralelo una Arquitectura de la Necesidad o de Emergencia en manos de personas que no detentan grandes estudios de arquitectura, pero a los que las circustancias les han llevado a convertirse en improvisados arquitectos.

Esta exposición reúne varios ejemplos que, aunque distintos y geográficamente lejanos, tienen como denominador común dar visibilidad a construcciones llevadas a cabo por sus propios habitantes, a menudo de manera caótica, en contextos en los que la realidad social ha relegado a un segundo plano la organización reglada que dicta el urbanismo. Situaciones y procesos, en la mayoría de los casos espontáneos, que con el paso del tiempo han dado lugar a verdaderas tipologías en sectores que carecen de servicios sociales y de abastecimiento básicos.

Los artistas y colectivos Raúl Cárdenas/Torolab, Santiago Cirugeda/Recetas Urbanas, Democracia, Gean Moreno, Ernesto Oroza, Juan Carlos Robles y Todo por la Praxis, han dado imagen a algunos casos de Madrid, Sevilla, Miami, Tijuana y La Habana.

Activities at the Cultural Center of Spain are sponsored by the Spanish Agency of International Cooperation to the Development (AECID), Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners.

Schedule is subject to changes. All activities have limited seating. For more information, please visit www.ccemiami.org
Centro Cultural Español
800 Douglas Road. Suite 170
Coral Gables, FL 33134
Ph: 305.448.9677

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Bhakti Baxter, Nicolas Lobo, Gean Moreno, Daniel Newman, Ernesto Oroza, and Gavin Perry will be featured in the exhibition, Spit-Polishing a Starless Sky/Outer Space, at Charest-Weinberg Gallery, from September 12 through October 5, 2009. The opening reception will be on September 12 from 6pm to 9 pm at 250 NW 23rd Street, Space 408, Miami, FL 33127.

The exhibition is comprised of two different exhibitions that have been superimposed without any attempt to make them cohere. Two sets of information have simply been brought together, and the resulting form of the exhibition will be determined by the very dynamics of their interaction.

The first exhibition, Spit-Polishing a Starless Sky, is made up of black or nearly-black paintings by Bhakti Baxter, Daniel Newman and Gavin Perry. In the work of all these painters, the black monochrome is entwined with references that belong in cultural spheres that exist far away from formalist concerns. In Baxter’s case, the black paintings double as images of macroscopic phenomena and have a scientific flavor. In Perry’s work, the black monochrome is literally the high-end side of paintings that also trade in lowbrow referents and objects, like cheap rugs and souped up cars. With Newman, the black glaze is all process. He has covered over 200 found paintings with black, turning a gesture characteristic of iconophobia into a delirious flow of production. In a sense, in the work of all these painters, two sets of information are already blended. Each of their works becomes a stand-in for the overall structure of a double-exhibition with incompatible or competing halves.

The second exhibition, Outer Space, titled after a 1999 short film by Peter Tscherkassky, will be made up of sculptural proposals by Nicolas Lobo and Giancarlo Sardone, and Ernesto Oroza and Gean Moreno. Each of these collaborative projects begins with elements provided by the technologies, conventions and infrastructure that form the invisible materiality of our social space. Working through all the engineering problems and ontological recoding that rendering a virtual artifact in actual space brings, Lobo has collaborated with terrazzo mason Sardone to produced a real-life double of a standard bench that can be found ready-made in the design program SketchUp. As the bench took shape, its proportions began to feel slightly off due to some distortion caused the Sketchup rendering engine. What looked like a perfectly bland bench on screen takes on an uncanny air in our physical space. Oroza and Moreno will use the tabloid, of the sort found throughout the city’s neighborhoods, to create both a “catalog” and an ornamental wallpaper pattern from forms determined by the exhibition itself that will, in turn, activate the supposed neutral walls of the space.

All the artists in the exhibition are part of Miami’s burgeoning scene. They have all exhibited their work internationally and are represented in the collections of major museums. This will be the first time their work is shown at Charest-Weinberg Gallery, whose reputation continues to grow as Miami’s premier venue for emerging art.