 | Contemporary Middle Passage
(here) and (there), 1997
Annalee Davis |
We find ourselves at the edge of a new millennium. Globalization and cybernetics have changed the landscape of our world. The changes are intense; frontiers are disappearing and we are overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of available information. Borders are blurred, while regionalism is more pronounced. Markets are opening up while man is withdrawing into himself. Distances and spaces are being altered. Man is “contextualized” vis-à-vis a machine which is at once a means of communication, an information source, a basis of work, and an access to the market. Our use of language is changing. Verbs like”to be” or “to navigate” have interpretations not in the dictionary since a new nation of space permits conjugating them in a virtual manner. We can “be” somewhere without being physically present, or “travel” somewhere without leaving our chair. The meaning of other words is also changed. The arroba of our childhood (in Spanish the symbol for a 25-pound weight) now used as the @ in e-mail addresses, has become a postal code. The Spanish language is being left behind and the English-based language of the machine speaks for us. As the Italian writer Elias Cannetti notes in his book “La Conciencia de Las Palabras”, the creator should be immersed in his epoch. Like a sponge, he must absorb the events of his time because his creative obligation is to interpret it. Artists as witnesses of their time tell their stories from the vantage point of their particular circumstances. At the same time, they chronicle changes in sensibility even before we are able to fully understand them, much less write theories about the new directions being taken.  | Bandages 2, 1997
Daniel Garcia |
As a framework to approach the realities and investigations of these artists, I took “Six Proposals for the Next Millennium” by the writer Italo Calvino as a point of departure for examining the values of the next era. Lightness, speed, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and ubiquity are the concepts that permeate his text. We find these same concepts in the exhibit: they serve as beacons that reveal artistic truth. Rubens Gerchman, in his “Homage to Torres García,” produces a geographic void where compass coordinates are altered. The void is also represented in the landscape of Oscar Bony; in the cold silence of gazing eyes in the work of Graciela Sacco; in the conceptual irreverence of Arturo Duclos; in the way in which man’s physical size is modified in the work of Ignacio Iturria; in the ambiguity of form and the invention of a landscape with no horizon in the work of Joe Fafard; or in the physical “conditionality” of Fernando Feuereisen’s worlds of solicitude. The difference between real and virtual space opens up other doors. Artists are questioning the nature of the place to which electronics is transporting us, a place where the limits of privacy, individuality, and nationality are shattered. Globalization also creates another meaning for borders and personal and social values. This why the demarcation of spaces where each artist examines his autonomy -- that of his body and that of his condition of solitude -- are so meaningful and fascinating. We can see how an individual story is interpreted in the box and surgical anatomy of Iraida Icaza; in the reflection on appearances and the irony in the possibilities of what it is to be human in the paintings of Ray Smith, in Bernardo Krasniansky’s multiple readings of the pages of a book which reflects different esthetic interpretations of the human body; or in Ernest Breleur’s bodiless identity.  | Untitled, 1998
Mario Benjamin |
The social space is where artists interpret man’s capacity to connect with the world, the city, and events. Artists are once again taking up instruments to invent navigational maps and examine personal cartography, as Antonio Seguí did with great mastery. In a different tone, it can be seen today in Guillermo Kuitca’s haunting map that traces the Nazi onslaught on the surface of an infant’s crib mattress. And in a work which relies solely on virtual reality. David Boxer depicts the inhuman way in which human beings were transported during the colonial period, showing us where slavery and the loss of human dignity began. The image is multiplied, while at the same time an accompanying video records another truth of the present. The world of video projections and social commitment can be found in the work of Rodrigo Facundo, where what is important is the intangible, one is submerged in an investigation of images of the past in order to understand the present. Life and death are unchanging existential concepts. Daniel García represents them in his world of images that go beyond the human body, to a death without life. Ernesto León reexamines religion in his treatment of gold leaf, which includes the use of fire, and invents his own particular form of solitude in the world of the couple.  | In a Line, 1999
Carlos Runcie Tanaka |
The artist constructs a totally unique language yet ends up interpreting a collective unconscious. This is evident in the sociopolitical situations of maladjustment reflected in Carolina Mayorga’s depiction of the burden of conventional morality on the condition of women; Milagros de la Torres’ representation of the categories of insanity in a society without civil justice; in the hopeless poverty of the Caribbean pueblo evoked in the installations of Tony Capellán; in the hecatomb of political society in the work of Gustavo Zalamea; in the intangible violence in the lead books of José Antonio Suárez in the economic dependence of an island reflected in the installation of Mac Latamie; or in the sensation of being without direction or nationality in the work of Annalee Davis. In the world of art, memory is the noblest gift. Artists, in their nonconformity with reality, call on memory as a constant exercise of identity. Concepts and images are registered in memory, the process of mental and emotional construction of the human beings. Memory implies an understanding of meanings and way to link past, present, and future. It is one of the human mechanisms that allows us to reaffirm exactly who we are. Memory is imbedded in each work. Certain artists, however are particularly concerned with giving it form. There is the memory of “not forgetting” in the work of Carlos Gallardo, who evokes the chimera of consumerism; the small funeral boxes where Carlos Montes de Oca situates with precision the places, where “the disappeared” [the desaparecidos] were lost in the Mapocho River, or Muriel Hasbun’s search for her own moral integrity in two divergent religious and two distant territories. This is one exhibit where we can see various paths of history. As Seneca said “Life is short, art is long.” Let us see in art that which is beyond our own time, or, perhaps, that which is an instant in our world. Ana María Escallón, Chief Curator Ana María Escallón is the Director of Art Museum of the Americas, OAS
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