2023 OSMOS STATION
Installation views, El Cóndor Pasa
Solo show, OSMOS Station, Stamford NY
March 9 – June 14, 2023 – open by appointment
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Press Release: “El Cóndor Pasa is a Peruvian song by composer Daniel Alomía Robles, written in 1913 and based on traditional Andean Music. The song is well known internationally for the 1970s version recorded by Simon & Garfunkel, which included English lyrics. This reinterpretation, migration, and expansion of the song present a parallel for Mujica, a Chilean artist who migrated to New York 23 years ago. The Andean Cóndor is the largest bird in the world and is occasionally seen flying around and over the Andes Mountains, through Ecuador, Bolivia, Perú, and Chile, a region with a strong and ancestral textile history.
In 2006, Felipe Mujica began making Curtains, a body of textile work that is always produced with the assistance of seamstresses and embroiderers. Initially, the projects were small or medium-scale and manufactured in the home/studio of the artist or his collaborator(s). With time, the scale increased and the working method evolved: collaboration and learning were forged as situations of knowledge exchange. The title curtain is intended to start and focus the conversation about the work from the domestic, from the politics of daily life.
The starting point of each curtain project is the history of geometric abstraction, expanding the formal into the social, drawing toward space, and the concrete towards the soft. The curtains are temporary and permeable architecture, they are interactive with the public and with space, always in movement, always open to receive information and share it. Each curtain is literally and metaphorically a surface where different forms of knowledge meet and collide, creating something new neither the artist nor his collaborators could have achieved on their own.
The project at OSMOS Station in Stamford, NY, consists of ten curtains, produced based on local quilting techniques and tradition. Guided by Danielle Tucker, a local quilt maker who comes from a family of quilters. The idea of working with quilting techniques comes from the intention – which crosses most of Mujica’s textile projects – of studying and incorporating local knowledge. As the Northeast of the United States has a rich quilt history, the project set itself the task to expand its possibilities, as textile pieces that interact with space and the environment experimentally, in this case in dialogue with a traditional barn transformed into a studio/exhibition space, and with the surrounding landscape.
The exhibition of Mujica’s curtains at OSMOS Station introduces, in the artists’ words, an impossible situation: “I can imagine a Condor flying over the Catskills, observing and maybe even trying to learn from Quilt traditions.”
OSMOS Station is a community-oriented artist studio and residency in the Western Catskills of New York with a commitment to bringing new artists to Stamford and Delaware County, as well as offering workshops to foster skills for locals in the art industry.
This exhibition is supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.”
Photos: 3, 4, 5, & 8 by Rodrigo Pereda. All other photos by Felipe Mujica.
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