2010 DIE ECKE

2010 DIE ECKE ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO

Installation views and individual shots, Hay luz en cada ventana
Solo show, Die Ecke Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago de Chile
July 15 – August 14, 2010

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This exhibition takes its title from a quote to Fiorello La Guardia, Mayor of New York City between 1934 and 1945. The exclamation describes the luminance quality of the first public housing projects in the city. The phrase contains a strong – and almost mystic – positivism typical of that period, one in which architecture and urbanism were considered as large-scale forces of change, one that would redefine and transform New York into a modern city.

There is Light in Every Window is composed by two bodies of work. On the one hand a group of silk-screen prints which appropriate and transform images from two books; the first book was found on the street and was published in the United States in 1968, it consists of a written and visual defense to sensorial and behavioral experimentation through the use of LSD and other drugs; the other was a gift from a kin and is a book about political and socially engaged posters produced in Chile during more or less the same period (late 60’s and early 70’s). On first sight, these two narratives have nothing in common yet they do share the historical context of May 1968 and therefore both stand as alternative positions to mainstream culture. The silk-screens by Felipe Mujica present new readings of these references, creating new images in a frozen-like state, in-between an image that wants to become something new and an image that is suspended in its own history.

The second piece in the exhibition belongs to a series of sculptural installations grouped under the title of Línea de hormigas. The piece appropriates modernist sculptural concepts and strategies yet its materiality is very fragile and ephemeral, which makes it a sort of impossible piece, standing as an undefined element, in a way inconclusive in its intentions. Línea de hormigas is a project in which sculpture is born and conceived as a failed object, critical to its own historical failure.