September 9, 2006

Latin American Artists, #4, Maria Magdalena Campos Pons


Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons
Replenishing
Polacolor #6 prints, 1998

Born and raised in Cuba, María Magdalena Campos-Pons studied in Havana at the National School of Art and the Superior Institute of Art (ISA), later training at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. She has lived and worked in Boston since 1991 and has shown extensively in the United States, Canada and abroad. Her work is in important public and private collections, including the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Campos-Pons was one of the artists in the United States representation at the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale, and showed in the 2001 Venice Biennale. Campos-Pons works in a variety of media, including photography, painting, and performance video. Recurring themes in her work include maintaining ties with the people and land from which she comes, the special character and role of women's discourse in society, and the nature of family communication.



Abriendo Caminos 2, 1997. Large-format Polaroid.
Check out "RITUAL, MIRROR AND EYE," Saint Louis University, Museum of Contemporary Religious Art .
http://mocra.slu.edu/past_exhibitions/RitoEspejoOjo.html

Latin American Artists, #3 Teresita Fernandez


Teresita Fernández is a sculptor who integrates architecture and the optical effects of color and light to produce exquisitely constructed, contemplative spaces. In her sculptural environments, Fernández alters space to create illusions, subtly modifying the physical sensations of the viewer and dramatizing the role architecture plays in shaping our lives and perceptions. Her room-sized installations evoke quietude and mystery, reflecting such diverse aesthetic influences as Roman and Ottoman architecture and Japanese gardens. In other works, she creates large-scale, referential constructions, such as a pool, a waterfall, and a sand dune stripped of specific context. With these pared-down pieces, she invites viewers to draw from their personal memories and observations. Employing common building materials to startling effect – tiny plastic cubes form a shimmering rainbow and acrylic rods suggest the flexible strength of bamboo – she inspires viewers to see a new relationship between built environments and the natural world. With lyrical and immaculately executed indoor and outdoor works, Fernández is pushing the boundaries of sculpture and installation art into the fields of architecture and landscape architecture.

Latin American Artists, #2 Liliana Porter


The toy is the recipient of our subjectivity . . . it is an entity capable of becoming, through us, either banal or significant. Every emotional relation with a toy is our creation; its sense, its intention and its weight depend on us.
- Liliana Porter-

"Blue Eyes," 2000, cibachrome, 32.5 x 22.25 inches

This is a link to her exhibition, "Secret Lives of Toys": Liliana Porter Photographs, Orme Lewis Gallery at the Phoenix Art Muesum

Liliana Porter, born and raised in Argentina, lives and works in New York. Although primarily a printmaker and painter, photography has been a point of departure for her work, as have children's toys and kitsch objects. In this exhibition, her deceptively simple photographic portraits feature toys and figurines, alone or in pairs, who are directly engaging the viewer or conversing between themselves. The moment caught by Porter's camera seems to be real, as if the characters are posing and have even dressed up for the occasion.
Really delightful...

Latin American Artists, #1 Vik Minuz


Peruse some of Vik's playful, fun, witty, enigmatic images., Sugar children, Pictures of chocolate, River Bone, Pictures of wire, The invisble object, Pictures of thread.

This is a link to the "WORST POSSIBLE ILLUSION: The Curiosity Cabinet of Vik Muniz, a film by Anne-Marie Russell, Director/Producer; Paige West, Executive Producer; Aaron Woolf/ Director of Photography; Iris Cahn/Editor; Selina Lewis Davidson /Co-Producer; Nancy Roth/ Co-Producer



http://www.vikmuniz.net/main.html