MexiCali Biennial http://mexicalibiennial.org MexiCali Biennial ART/MUSIC Thu, 24 Jan 2013 18:39:57 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 Off-Ramp interview with MB 13 Curators http://mexicalibiennial.org/2013/01/24/506/ http://mexicalibiennial.org/2013/01/24/506/#comments Thu, 24 Jan 2013 18:18:52 +0000 linen1 http://mexicalibiennial.org/?p=506 Feast on the MexiCali Biennial at Vincent Price Art Museum. This year: Cannibalism

download interview here

Off-Ramp website

John Rabe | Off-Ramp |

Sergio Bromberg

John Rabe

At the opening of MexiCali Biennial at Vincent Price Art Museum

As the non-profit group that runs the MexiCali Biennial describes it, “The cannibal is a creature that threatens the collapse of identity and ethics, and instills anarchy in the social order” and “can change our relationship with art, and perhaps with the world itself.”

Cannibalism is the theme for the latest biennial. That’s more than two dozen artists taking, consuming, and gaining the power of the thing or the person consumed.

We talked with curators Ed Gomez, Luis Hernandez, and Amy Pederson about the show, which includes work by Fred Alvarado, Natalia Anciso, Marycarmen Arroyo Macias, Ana Baranda, Juan Bastardo, Sergio Bromberg, Helen Cahng, Matthew Carter, Carolyn Castaño, Enrique Castrejon, Tony de los Reyes, Deborah Diehl & Arzu Arda Kosar, Dino Dinco and Rafa Esparza, Veronica Duarte, Roni Feldman, Kio Griffith & Carmina Escobar, Zoè Gruni, HELL- (0) featuring: Michael Dee, Martin Durazo and Ichiro Irie, Daniel Lara, Candice Lin, Juan Luna-Avin, Matt MacFarland, Dominic Paul Miller, Flavia Monteiro, Nancy Popp, Peter Bo Rappmund, Christopher Reynolds, Cindy Santos Bravo, and Fidelius X.

The Vincent Price Art Museum is at East LA College, 1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez, Monterey Park, CA 91754-6099. The MexiCali Biennial is showing through April 13.

]]> Feast on the MexiCali Biennial at Vincent Price Art Museum. This year: Cannibalism

download interview here

Off-Ramp website

John Rabe | Off-Ramp |

Sergio Bromberg

John Rabe

At the opening of MexiCali Biennial at Vincent Price Art Museum

As the non-profit group that runs the MexiCali Biennial describes it, “The cannibal is a creature that threatens the collapse of identity and ethics, and instills anarchy in the social order” and “can change our relationship with art, and perhaps with the world itself.”

Cannibalism is the theme for the latest biennial. That’s more than two dozen artists taking, consuming, and gaining the power of the thing or the person consumed.

We talked with curators Ed Gomez, Luis Hernandez, and Amy Pederson about the show, which includes work by Fred Alvarado, Natalia Anciso, Marycarmen Arroyo Macias, Ana Baranda, Juan Bastardo, Sergio Bromberg, Helen Cahng, Matthew Carter, Carolyn Castaño, Enrique Castrejon, Tony de los Reyes, Deborah Diehl & Arzu Arda Kosar, Dino Dinco and Rafa Esparza, Veronica Duarte, Roni Feldman, Kio Griffith & Carmina Escobar, Zoè Gruni, HELL- (0) featuring: Michael Dee, Martin Durazo and Ichiro Irie, Daniel Lara, Candice Lin, Juan Luna-Avin, Matt MacFarland, Dominic Paul Miller, Flavia Monteiro, Nancy Popp, Peter Bo Rappmund, Christopher Reynolds, Cindy Santos Bravo, and Fidelius X.

The Vincent Price Art Museum is at East LA College, 1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez, Monterey Park, CA 91754-6099. The MexiCali Biennial is showing through April 13.

]]> http://mexicalibiennial.org/2013/01/24/506/feed/ 0 PRESS for the MexiCali Biennail 2013 http://mexicalibiennial.org/2013/01/24/press-for-the-mexicali-biennail-2013/ http://mexicalibiennial.org/2013/01/24/press-for-the-mexicali-biennail-2013/#comments Thu, 24 Jan 2013 18:06:33 +0000 linen1 http://mexicalibiennial.org/?p=499

Cannibalism Is the Theme of the MexiCali Biennial. But Not in the Way You’d Think

Comments (1) By Alissa Walker Thursday, Jan 17 2013

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Dominic Paul Miller

Upon entering the 2013 MexiCali Biennial, visitors will be asked by a security guard to position their heads in the oval opening of a steel panel, where a camera will document their faces. In order to be admitted to the exhibition, visitors must agree to do this.

Vincent Price Art Museum1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez
Monterey Park, CA 91754Category: MuseumsThe work, by Sergio Bromberg, reminds co-curator Ed Gomez of a real-life situation he experienced when he was given a retinal scan as he crossed the border into Tijuana.

It also reminds him of cannibalism.

“You have no control over how your likeness is used,” he says. “In a surveillance state, your image can be used and be taken from you. It’s about the consumption of the image.”

“Cannibalism in the New World” — including the consumption of people but also of possessions and culture — is the theme of the third MexiCali Biennial. It features mostly new works by 33 artists from Mexico and California in a show organized by Gomez, Luis G. Hernandez and Amy Pederson at the Vincent Price Art Museum on the East Los Angeles Community College campus.

While the title might conjure visions of Donner Party performance art or installations of Hannibal Lecter‘s fridge, Gomez says the word “cannibal” has larger cultural implications, especially for Mexican society.

“In colonial times during the conquest of Mexico, they believed that these heathens were worshipping pagan idols and practicing human sacrifice and forms of cannibalism,” he says of how the Spanish viewed the natives. “That became the justification and rationalization of the complete eradication and genocide of these indigenous people.”

As you walk into the gallery, Roni Feldman‘s imposing canvas confronts that sentiment head-on, rendering famous faces of imperialism, from Christopher Columbus to Jean-Luc Picard, in inky black, airbrushed portraits.

“For us it was fun to see how the artists approached the theme,” Gomez says. “Would they show up with knives and severed heads, or are they going to talk about larger social and political issues?”

An artist who brilliantly explores the latter is Dominic Paul Miller, who encases a backlit, large-format photo of an empty Tijuana maquiladora (the name for a factory in Mexico where laborers work for U.S. companies) within a sealed plastic box, creating a symbolic vacant lot. The photo, at once beautiful and devastating, is one of the more bracing examples of American consumption, greed and waste being imposed upon Mexico.

“Corporations are people, and corporations eat other people,” Gomez says. “In a weird way, capitalism is very cannibalistic.”

The show also portrays cannibalism in a more positive light, as an artistic method through which something new is created. Gomez points to Tropicália, the modernist movement in Brazil, where musicians like Os Mutantes were “unapologetic” about fusing traditional samba music with psychedelic rock. “If something was introduced as the ‘other,’ they would consume it and make it their own instead of being second to the source,” Gomez explains.

The inspiration for the movement came from Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade, who in 1928 published his Manifesto Antropófago, or Cannibal Manifesto, which argues that “cannibalizing” European culture was Brazil’s best method to save its creative community from colonial obliteration.

This idea of consuming and reappropriating various parts of Mexican and American culture is illustrated to comic effect in Cindy Santos Bravo‘s piece on “pointy boots,” a subculture merging electronica and Mexican folk music, where dance troupes sport skinny jeans and cowboy boots with tips so long the wearers can hold onto them like reins. (For reference, watch the Vice magazine video “Mexican Pointy Boots.”) In a poof of feathers and outrageously long boot tips, Bravo manages to both glorify and lampoon the flamboyant trend, which is now being mixed and remixed on both sides of the border.

Not surprisingly, the border appears as a sobering presence in several pieces. Tony de los Reyes traces the California-Mexico border across a canvas in a stark white path, then washes both sides in bright colors, which blend and bleed haphazardly, as each culture devours and succumbs to the other.

Natalia Anciso embellishes a large dinner table with what appears to be decorative filigree — except that it’s victims of the border war, like drug traffickers and military personnel, which are embedded in the floral motif. Our shameful contemporary version of human sacrifice.

Of course, there are some artists who cheekily, if gratuitously, reference the devouring of human flesh. Christopher Reynolds, an L.A.-based artist whose work explores food, has contributed Appetite Apparatus #1, a panel painted in a Pepto-Bismol shade known as Baker-Miller pink, which is said to relax the body and suppress the appetite. (Viewers can wear special chromatherapy goggles tinted in the same pink for the full effect.)

There’s a piece I don’t want to spoil for you by Guadalajara-based Juan Bastardo, titled Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? At the opening, Dino Dinco and Rafa Esparza will dole out bright red paletas, or Mexican popsicles, from a vending cart. The flavor, they claim, is blood.

In its wit and subversiveness, MexiCali Biennial has evolved into more of an anti-biennial biennial — almost a statement about the glut and pomp of biennials in the art world. The first was held in 2006, when Gomez and Hernandez invited 13 L.A. artists to show at La Casa de la Tia Tina, an alternative arts space in an abandoned home in Mexicali. The second was three years later, in 2009. Organizing this show, four years later, artists were selected from an open call on the merit of their work, not their CVs.

“A lot of artists aren’t ones who are showing in galleries in L.A.,” Hernandez says. “For many of them, this is their first museum exhibition.”

Indeed, the MexiCali Biennial shines by highlighting emerging voices from Mexico and California but also by exhibiting them in parallel shows. “It doesn’t necessarily have to happen every two years, but it should happen on each side of the U.S./Mexican border,” Gomez says.

The attractive new Vincent Price Art Museum, with its vast holdings of Mexican and Central American art collected by the actor, is the perfect home on this side of the border. After its L.A. run, the exhibition will travel to a gallery in Mexicali, and another performance and video-themed event is planned in Monterrey, Mexico.

In a way, it’s less about the exhibition itself than about the cultural exchange that occurs, the action of each artist crossing the border into the other country to participate. According to Gomez, most of the artists will be at both openings — uniting a politically divided geographic area into one singular region of aesthetic production.

MEXICALI BIENNIAL 2013: “CANNIBALISM IN THE NEW WORLD” | Vincent Price Art Museum, 1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez, Monterey Park | Jan. 19-April 13; opening reception Jan. 19, 6-9 p.m. | vincentpriceartmuseum.org

]]>

Cannibalism Is the Theme of the MexiCali Biennial. But Not in the Way You’d Think

Comments (1) By Alissa Walker Thursday, Jan 17 2013

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Dominic Paul Miller

Upon entering the 2013 MexiCali Biennial, visitors will be asked by a security guard to position their heads in the oval opening of a steel panel, where a camera will document their faces. In order to be admitted to the exhibition, visitors must agree to do this.

Vincent Price Art Museum1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez
Monterey Park, CA 91754Category: MuseumsThe work, by Sergio Bromberg, reminds co-curator Ed Gomez of a real-life situation he experienced when he was given a retinal scan as he crossed the border into Tijuana.

It also reminds him of cannibalism.

“You have no control over how your likeness is used,” he says. “In a surveillance state, your image can be used and be taken from you. It’s about the consumption of the image.”

“Cannibalism in the New World” — including the consumption of people but also of possessions and culture — is the theme of the third MexiCali Biennial. It features mostly new works by 33 artists from Mexico and California in a show organized by Gomez, Luis G. Hernandez and Amy Pederson at the Vincent Price Art Museum on the East Los Angeles Community College campus.

While the title might conjure visions of Donner Party performance art or installations of Hannibal Lecter‘s fridge, Gomez says the word “cannibal” has larger cultural implications, especially for Mexican society.

“In colonial times during the conquest of Mexico, they believed that these heathens were worshipping pagan idols and practicing human sacrifice and forms of cannibalism,” he says of how the Spanish viewed the natives. “That became the justification and rationalization of the complete eradication and genocide of these indigenous people.”

As you walk into the gallery, Roni Feldman‘s imposing canvas confronts that sentiment head-on, rendering famous faces of imperialism, from Christopher Columbus to Jean-Luc Picard, in inky black, airbrushed portraits.

“For us it was fun to see how the artists approached the theme,” Gomez says. “Would they show up with knives and severed heads, or are they going to talk about larger social and political issues?”

An artist who brilliantly explores the latter is Dominic Paul Miller, who encases a backlit, large-format photo of an empty Tijuana maquiladora (the name for a factory in Mexico where laborers work for U.S. companies) within a sealed plastic box, creating a symbolic vacant lot. The photo, at once beautiful and devastating, is one of the more bracing examples of American consumption, greed and waste being imposed upon Mexico.

“Corporations are people, and corporations eat other people,” Gomez says. “In a weird way, capitalism is very cannibalistic.”

The show also portrays cannibalism in a more positive light, as an artistic method through which something new is created. Gomez points to Tropicália, the modernist movement in Brazil, where musicians like Os Mutantes were “unapologetic” about fusing traditional samba music with psychedelic rock. “If something was introduced as the ‘other,’ they would consume it and make it their own instead of being second to the source,” Gomez explains.

The inspiration for the movement came from Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade, who in 1928 published his Manifesto Antropófago, or Cannibal Manifesto, which argues that “cannibalizing” European culture was Brazil’s best method to save its creative community from colonial obliteration.

This idea of consuming and reappropriating various parts of Mexican and American culture is illustrated to comic effect in Cindy Santos Bravo‘s piece on “pointy boots,” a subculture merging electronica and Mexican folk music, where dance troupes sport skinny jeans and cowboy boots with tips so long the wearers can hold onto them like reins. (For reference, watch the Vice magazine video “Mexican Pointy Boots.”) In a poof of feathers and outrageously long boot tips, Bravo manages to both glorify and lampoon the flamboyant trend, which is now being mixed and remixed on both sides of the border.

Not surprisingly, the border appears as a sobering presence in several pieces. Tony de los Reyes traces the California-Mexico border across a canvas in a stark white path, then washes both sides in bright colors, which blend and bleed haphazardly, as each culture devours and succumbs to the other.

Natalia Anciso embellishes a large dinner table with what appears to be decorative filigree — except that it’s victims of the border war, like drug traffickers and military personnel, which are embedded in the floral motif. Our shameful contemporary version of human sacrifice.

Of course, there are some artists who cheekily, if gratuitously, reference the devouring of human flesh. Christopher Reynolds, an L.A.-based artist whose work explores food, has contributed Appetite Apparatus #1, a panel painted in a Pepto-Bismol shade known as Baker-Miller pink, which is said to relax the body and suppress the appetite. (Viewers can wear special chromatherapy goggles tinted in the same pink for the full effect.)

There’s a piece I don’t want to spoil for you by Guadalajara-based Juan Bastardo, titled Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? At the opening, Dino Dinco and Rafa Esparza will dole out bright red paletas, or Mexican popsicles, from a vending cart. The flavor, they claim, is blood.

In its wit and subversiveness, MexiCali Biennial has evolved into more of an anti-biennial biennial — almost a statement about the glut and pomp of biennials in the art world. The first was held in 2006, when Gomez and Hernandez invited 13 L.A. artists to show at La Casa de la Tia Tina, an alternative arts space in an abandoned home in Mexicali. The second was three years later, in 2009. Organizing this show, four years later, artists were selected from an open call on the merit of their work, not their CVs.

“A lot of artists aren’t ones who are showing in galleries in L.A.,” Hernandez says. “For many of them, this is their first museum exhibition.”

Indeed, the MexiCali Biennial shines by highlighting emerging voices from Mexico and California but also by exhibiting them in parallel shows. “It doesn’t necessarily have to happen every two years, but it should happen on each side of the U.S./Mexican border,” Gomez says.

The attractive new Vincent Price Art Museum, with its vast holdings of Mexican and Central American art collected by the actor, is the perfect home on this side of the border. After its L.A. run, the exhibition will travel to a gallery in Mexicali, and another performance and video-themed event is planned in Monterrey, Mexico.

In a way, it’s less about the exhibition itself than about the cultural exchange that occurs, the action of each artist crossing the border into the other country to participate. According to Gomez, most of the artists will be at both openings — uniting a politically divided geographic area into one singular region of aesthetic production.

MEXICALI BIENNIAL 2013: “CANNIBALISM IN THE NEW WORLD” | Vincent Price Art Museum, 1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez, Monterey Park | Jan. 19-April 13; opening reception Jan. 19, 6-9 p.m. | vincentpriceartmuseum.org

]]> http://mexicalibiennial.org/2013/01/24/press-for-the-mexicali-biennail-2013/feed/ 0 QR Text http://mexicalibiennial.org/2013/01/17/472/ http://mexicalibiennial.org/2013/01/17/472/#comments Thu, 17 Jan 2013 04:40:20 +0000 linen1 http://mexicalibiennial.org/?p=472 MexiCali_2013_text

According to Romanian philosopher Catalin Avramescu, the cannibal is a scholarly creature, a thought experiment that interrogates identity on the verge of collapse, posits an ethics without morals, and instills anarchy into the social order.[1] In the West, “the cannibal is the messenger of disorder, the proof that moral chaos has descended upon us, human nature at its worst, the unusable atom of an impossible social order.”[2] Cannibalism in the New World, whether real or imagined, was one of the central moral rationales for colonialism, and it is no accident that the etymological and sociological origins of the cannibal coincide with the discovery of the Americas.

Historically, utopic tendencies in Western modernism have had a forward thrust, projecting into an imaginary space of the future and driven by the forces of technology. By contrast, the Latin American avant garde project of the last century frequently looked to the past, with the seeds of utopia located not in the technological future, but in the purity of the pre-Colombian and autochthonous past. However, these locations are equally phantasmic. The dependence on either trajectory for a post-colonial artistic practice fails because of this historical myopia, a short-sightedness that can only superficially resolve the conflicts inherent within the production of international contemporary art in any location other than the West. This MexiCali Biennial proposes cannibalism as a strategy for the production of a Latin and North American avant garde in the present.

There is no need to draw a line between actual and symbolic anthropophagy; they are part of the same system of meaning. Through ingestion, digestion, and subsumation, the cannibal bridges the gap between political science and moral philosophy, nature and civilization, north and south, east and west, the self and the other. Beyond the boundaries of civilization is an inverted world where all laws are challenged, “…the limit beyond which evil nature becomes visible, whence it came and whither it was summoned to return.”[3]

We take as our inspiration the Brazilian Tropicàlia movement and its anthropophagous tendencies, particularly the work of Hélio Oiticica.[4] Developed in the effervescent cultural climate of the late 1950s, and checked by the military regime of 1968 and the “black years” of institutional violence that followed, Oiticica’s practice opened up radical new spaces in art for bodies and their environmental interactions. These methods of individual and collective production pushed against an aesthetic experience produced by hegemonic cultural and artistic systems, and moved towards a transformation of the world itself. This urgency in regards to transforming the system of art was part of a cultural and political strategy of opposition to forms of oppression within Brazilian life. It was more than just a move towards a plural, open subjectivity, and encompassed ideas of violence, appropriation, and a post-colonial Latin American artistic production burdened by the vocabularies of international contemporary art. The transformative possibilities of the experimental in art were predicated on changing our relationship with art and the world itself. These goals are shared by the MexiCali Biennial. Against the reversible world and objectified ideas. Made into cadavers.[5]

 

 

[1] Catalin Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (Princeton, NY: Princeton UP) 2009.

[2] Justin E.H. Smith and Catalin Avramescu, “The Raw and the Cooked: Interview with Catalin Avramescu,” Cabinet 39 (Fall 2010).

[3] Avramescu: 8.

[4] Catherine David, “Hélio Oiticica: Brazil Experiment” in The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Helio Oiticica, and Mira Schendel (Los Angeles, CA: MOCA) 2000.

 

 

[5] Oswaldo de Andrade, Manifesto Antropofago (1928).

]]> MexiCali_2013_text

According to Romanian philosopher Catalin Avramescu, the cannibal is a scholarly creature, a thought experiment that interrogates identity on the verge of collapse, posits an ethics without morals, and instills anarchy into the social order.[1] In the West, “the cannibal is the messenger of disorder, the proof that moral chaos has descended upon us, human nature at its worst, the unusable atom of an impossible social order.”[2] Cannibalism in the New World, whether real or imagined, was one of the central moral rationales for colonialism, and it is no accident that the etymological and sociological origins of the cannibal coincide with the discovery of the Americas.

Historically, utopic tendencies in Western modernism have had a forward thrust, projecting into an imaginary space of the future and driven by the forces of technology. By contrast, the Latin American avant garde project of the last century frequently looked to the past, with the seeds of utopia located not in the technological future, but in the purity of the pre-Colombian and autochthonous past. However, these locations are equally phantasmic. The dependence on either trajectory for a post-colonial artistic practice fails because of this historical myopia, a short-sightedness that can only superficially resolve the conflicts inherent within the production of international contemporary art in any location other than the West. This MexiCali Biennial proposes cannibalism as a strategy for the production of a Latin and North American avant garde in the present.

There is no need to draw a line between actual and symbolic anthropophagy; they are part of the same system of meaning. Through ingestion, digestion, and subsumation, the cannibal bridges the gap between political science and moral philosophy, nature and civilization, north and south, east and west, the self and the other. Beyond the boundaries of civilization is an inverted world where all laws are challenged, “…the limit beyond which evil nature becomes visible, whence it came and whither it was summoned to return.”[3]

We take as our inspiration the Brazilian Tropicàlia movement and its anthropophagous tendencies, particularly the work of Hélio Oiticica.[4] Developed in the effervescent cultural climate of the late 1950s, and checked by the military regime of 1968 and the “black years” of institutional violence that followed, Oiticica’s practice opened up radical new spaces in art for bodies and their environmental interactions. These methods of individual and collective production pushed against an aesthetic experience produced by hegemonic cultural and artistic systems, and moved towards a transformation of the world itself. This urgency in regards to transforming the system of art was part of a cultural and political strategy of opposition to forms of oppression within Brazilian life. It was more than just a move towards a plural, open subjectivity, and encompassed ideas of violence, appropriation, and a post-colonial Latin American artistic production burdened by the vocabularies of international contemporary art. The transformative possibilities of the experimental in art were predicated on changing our relationship with art and the world itself. These goals are shared by the MexiCali Biennial. Against the reversible world and objectified ideas. Made into cadavers.[5]

 

 

[1] Catalin Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (Princeton, NY: Princeton UP) 2009.

[2] Justin E.H. Smith and Catalin Avramescu, “The Raw and the Cooked: Interview with Catalin Avramescu,” Cabinet 39 (Fall 2010).

[3] Avramescu: 8.

[4] Catherine David, “Hélio Oiticica: Brazil Experiment” in The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Helio Oiticica, and Mira Schendel (Los Angeles, CA: MOCA) 2000.

 

 

[5] Oswaldo de Andrade, Manifesto Antropofago (1928).

]]> http://mexicalibiennial.org/2013/01/17/472/feed/ 0 e invite http://mexicalibiennial.org/2013/01/10/e-invite/ http://mexicalibiennial.org/2013/01/10/e-invite/#comments Thu, 10 Jan 2013 05:31:53 +0000 linen1 http://mexicalibiennial.org/?p=458 MexiCali Biennial 2013 opens January 19th
Monterey Park, CA—Vincent Price Art Museum is proud to host the MexiCali Biennial 2013: Cannibalism in the New World.
This project will include the work of more than thirty-three artists and collectives working in a variety of media spanning painting, video, installation, performance and sculpture. Press preview is Friday, January 18, 2 p.m.
Opening Reception
Saturday, January 19, 6 to 9 p.m., Large Gallery
Join MexiCali Biennial 2013 artists and curators for the grand opening of the exhibition.
Live performance by HELL-(O), and by Kio Griffith with Carmina Escobar.
Walkthrough with MexiCali Biennial 2013 Curators
Saturday, February 9, 2 p.m., Large Gallery
MexiCali Biennial 2013 curators Ed Gomez, Luis G. Hernandez, Amy Pederson, and several artists, will lead a tour of the exhibition.

Performance & Popp
Saturday April 13, 2 p.m., Vincent Price Art Museum
Performances by art metal bands HELL-(O) and Los Nuevos Maevans, Daniel Lara, and an intervention by Nancy Popp.

MexiCali Biennial 2013: Cannibalism in the New World continues to April 13, 2013.
Reception beverages provided by Jarritos Company.

]]> MexiCali Biennial 2013 opens January 19th
Monterey Park, CA—Vincent Price Art Museum is proud to host the MexiCali Biennial 2013: Cannibalism in the New World.
This project will include the work of more than thirty-three artists and collectives working in a variety of media spanning painting, video, installation, performance and sculpture. Press preview is Friday, January 18, 2 p.m.
Opening Reception
Saturday, January 19, 6 to 9 p.m., Large Gallery
Join MexiCali Biennial 2013 artists and curators for the grand opening of the exhibition.
Live performance by HELL-(O), and by Kio Griffith with Carmina Escobar.
Walkthrough with MexiCali Biennial 2013 Curators
Saturday, February 9, 2 p.m., Large Gallery
MexiCali Biennial 2013 curators Ed Gomez, Luis G. Hernandez, Amy Pederson, and several artists, will lead a tour of the exhibition.

Performance & Popp
Saturday April 13, 2 p.m., Vincent Price Art Museum
Performances by art metal bands HELL-(O) and Los Nuevos Maevans, Daniel Lara, and an intervention by Nancy Popp.

MexiCali Biennial 2013: Cannibalism in the New World continues to April 13, 2013.
Reception beverages provided by Jarritos Company.

]]> http://mexicalibiennial.org/2013/01/10/e-invite/feed/ 0 2013 posters http://mexicalibiennial.org/2013/01/05/2013-posters/ http://mexicalibiennial.org/2013/01/05/2013-posters/#comments Sat, 05 Jan 2013 20:10:42 +0000 linen1 http://mexicalibiennial.org/?p=450 11 x 17 inch high resolution 2013 posters, free to download

2013 exhibition poster

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2013 MexiCali Biennial poster 11 x 17

 

]]> 11 x 17 inch high resolution 2013 posters, free to download

2013 exhibition poster

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2013 MexiCali Biennial poster 11 x 17

 

]]> http://mexicalibiennial.org/2013/01/05/2013-posters/feed/ 0 Bon Appetit: An Hors d’Oeuvre for the Cannibal Feast http://mexicalibiennial.org/2012/11/06/bon-appetit-an-hors-doeuvre-for-the-cannibal-feast/ http://mexicalibiennial.org/2012/11/06/bon-appetit-an-hors-doeuvre-for-the-cannibal-feast/#comments Tue, 06 Nov 2012 03:31:37 +0000 linen1 http://mexicalibiennial.org/?p=420 Nov. 10th @ JAUS

An evening of performance and silent auction in support of MexiCali Biennial 2013

November 10, 6-10pm at JAUS
11851 La Grange Ave., Los Angeles, CA, 90025

featuring, The Legendary Blythe Bizzczar

performance by, Christopher Reynolds

featuring works by

Christopher Reynolds
and many more.

 

]]> Nov. 10th @ JAUS

An evening of performance and silent auction in support of MexiCali Biennial 2013

November 10, 6-10pm at JAUS
11851 La Grange Ave., Los Angeles, CA, 90025

featuring, The Legendary Blythe Bizzczar

performance by, Christopher Reynolds

featuring works by

Christopher Reynolds
and many more.

 

]]> http://mexicalibiennial.org/2012/11/06/bon-appetit-an-hors-doeuvre-for-the-cannibal-feast/feed/ 0 2013 Press Release http://mexicalibiennial.org/2012/10/18/2013-press-release/ http://mexicalibiennial.org/2012/10/18/2013-press-release/#comments Thu, 18 Oct 2012 02:52:08 +0000 linen1 http://mexicalibiennial.org/?p=402 For Immediate Release

MB_2013_press_release

MEXICALI BIENNIAL 2013
Cannibalism in the New World
January 19-April 13, 2013
Opening Reception: January 19, 6-9 PM
Location: Vincent Price Art Museum
East Los Angeles College
1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez
Monterey Park, CA 91754-6099
vincentpriceartmuseum.org

The MexiCali Biennial is a dynamic platform for creating new channels of
communication between artists and audiences in the US and Mexico.
VPAM is proud to host the third MexiCali Biennial from January 19 to April
13, 2013, and this project will include the work of 26 artists and collectives working in a variety of media, from sculpture and performance to video and painting.

The first MexiCali Biennial took place in 2006 at La Casa de Tia Tina in
Mexicali, Mexico and Chavez Studios in East Los Angeles. The second MexiCali
Biennial took place three years after the first, and was held in four different
locations spanning two years and two countries, and the third Biennial is
scheduled for early 2013 and will engage with the subject of cannibalism.

The cannibal is a creature that threatens the collapse of identity and ethics,
and instills anarchy in the social order. Cannibalism in the New World was one
of the central rationales for colonialism, but MexiCali also proposes it as a
path forward towards a new model for avant garde practice. Cannibalism can
open up radical new spaces in art for bodies and their environmental
interactions, and push against the oppressive pressure of hegemonic Western
cultural systems. These transformative possibilities can change our
relationship with art, and perhaps the world itself.

Curated by Ed Gomez, Luis G. Hernandez and Amy Pederson
Participating Artists:
Fred Alvarado, Natalia Anciso, Marycarmen Arroyo Macias, Ana Baranda, Juan Bastardo,
Sergio Bromberg, Helen Cahng, Matthew Carter, Carolyn Castaño, Enrique Castrejon, Tony de los Reyes, Map
Conception: Deborah Diehl & Arzu Arda Kosar, Dino Dinco and Rafa Esparza, Veronica Duarte,
Roni Feldman, Kio Griffith & Carmina Escobar, Zoè Gruni, HELL- (0) featuring: Michael Dee, Martin Durazo and Ichiro
Irie, Daniel Lara, Candice Lin, Juan Luna-Avin, Matt MacFarland, Dominic Paul Miller, Flavia Monteiro, Nancy Popp,
Peter Bo Rappmund, Christopher Reynolds, Cindy Santos Bravo, and Fidelius X
Media Contacts: Ed Gomez/ Luis G. Hernandez/ Amy Pederson and Biennial Project Manager, Jennifer Gardner
Tel: 310/766-2178
Email: info@mexicalibiennial.org
mexicalibiennial.org

]]> For Immediate Release

MB_2013_press_release

MEXICALI BIENNIAL 2013
Cannibalism in the New World
January 19-April 13, 2013
Opening Reception: January 19, 6-9 PM
Location: Vincent Price Art Museum
East Los Angeles College
1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez
Monterey Park, CA 91754-6099
vincentpriceartmuseum.org

The MexiCali Biennial is a dynamic platform for creating new channels of
communication between artists and audiences in the US and Mexico.
VPAM is proud to host the third MexiCali Biennial from January 19 to April
13, 2013, and this project will include the work of 26 artists and collectives working in a variety of media, from sculpture and performance to video and painting.

The first MexiCali Biennial took place in 2006 at La Casa de Tia Tina in
Mexicali, Mexico and Chavez Studios in East Los Angeles. The second MexiCali
Biennial took place three years after the first, and was held in four different
locations spanning two years and two countries, and the third Biennial is
scheduled for early 2013 and will engage with the subject of cannibalism.

The cannibal is a creature that threatens the collapse of identity and ethics,
and instills anarchy in the social order. Cannibalism in the New World was one
of the central rationales for colonialism, but MexiCali also proposes it as a
path forward towards a new model for avant garde practice. Cannibalism can
open up radical new spaces in art for bodies and their environmental
interactions, and push against the oppressive pressure of hegemonic Western
cultural systems. These transformative possibilities can change our
relationship with art, and perhaps the world itself.

Curated by Ed Gomez, Luis G. Hernandez and Amy Pederson
Participating Artists:
Fred Alvarado, Natalia Anciso, Marycarmen Arroyo Macias, Ana Baranda, Juan Bastardo,
Sergio Bromberg, Helen Cahng, Matthew Carter, Carolyn Castaño, Enrique Castrejon, Tony de los Reyes, Map
Conception: Deborah Diehl & Arzu Arda Kosar, Dino Dinco and Rafa Esparza, Veronica Duarte,
Roni Feldman, Kio Griffith & Carmina Escobar, Zoè Gruni, HELL- (0) featuring: Michael Dee, Martin Durazo and Ichiro
Irie, Daniel Lara, Candice Lin, Juan Luna-Avin, Matt MacFarland, Dominic Paul Miller, Flavia Monteiro, Nancy Popp,
Peter Bo Rappmund, Christopher Reynolds, Cindy Santos Bravo, and Fidelius X
Media Contacts: Ed Gomez/ Luis G. Hernandez/ Amy Pederson and Biennial Project Manager, Jennifer Gardner
Tel: 310/766-2178
Email: info@mexicalibiennial.org
mexicalibiennial.org

]]> http://mexicalibiennial.org/2012/10/18/2013-press-release/feed/ 0 2009/10 exhibition catalogue http://mexicalibiennial.org/2012/10/16/200910-exhibition-catalogue/ http://mexicalibiennial.org/2012/10/16/200910-exhibition-catalogue/#comments Tue, 16 Oct 2012 03:58:54 +0000 linen1 http://mexicalibiennial.org/?p=368

   

 

 

2009/10 MexiCali Biennial exhibition catalogue

PDF download of the 2009/10 MexiCali Biennial exhibition catalogue.  (free for a limited time)

To order a hard copy email Ed Gomez at zemogde@hotmail.com

Work by Skip Arnold, Juan Bastardo,
Anibal Catalan, Pablo Cobian, Jeff Chabot,
Michelle Chong, Fernando Corona,
Fidel Hernández, Rebeca Hernández, I.C.E.,
Nicholas Kersulis, Ryan Lamb, Ivan Limas,
Albert Lopez, Susana Rodriguez, Ernesto Rosas,
Gustavo Siono, Sergio Torres-Torres,
Jason Wallace Triefenbach
and Fundaçion Wanna Winnie.
Curated by Ed Gomez, Luis Hernandez and Amy
Pederson.

]]>

   

 

 

2009/10 MexiCali Biennial exhibition catalogue

PDF download of the 2009/10 MexiCali Biennial exhibition catalogue.  (free for a limited time)

To order a hard copy email Ed Gomez at zemogde@hotmail.com

Work by Skip Arnold, Juan Bastardo,
Anibal Catalan, Pablo Cobian, Jeff Chabot,
Michelle Chong, Fernando Corona,
Fidel Hernández, Rebeca Hernández, I.C.E.,
Nicholas Kersulis, Ryan Lamb, Ivan Limas,
Albert Lopez, Susana Rodriguez, Ernesto Rosas,
Gustavo Siono, Sergio Torres-Torres,
Jason Wallace Triefenbach
and Fundaçion Wanna Winnie.
Curated by Ed Gomez, Luis Hernandez and Amy
Pederson.

]]> http://mexicalibiennial.org/2012/10/16/200910-exhibition-catalogue/feed/ 0 MexiCali 2013 Participating Artists http://mexicalibiennial.org/2012/09/18/mexicali-2013-list-of-artists/ http://mexicalibiennial.org/2012/09/18/mexicali-2013-list-of-artists/#comments Tue, 18 Sep 2012 22:13:27 +0000 linen1 http://mexicalibiennial.org/?p=360 MexiCali Biennial 2013

January 19 to April 13, 2013

The MexiCali Biennial is a dynamic platform for creating new channels of communication between artists and audiences in the US and Mexico. VPAM is proud to host the third MexiCali Biennial that will take place from January 19 to April 13, 2013. The theme of MexiCali 2013 is cannibalism.

The cannibal is a creature that threatens the collapse of identity and ethics, and instills anarchy in the social order. Cannibalism in the New World was one of the central rationales for colonialism, but MexiCali also proposes it as the path forward for a new model of avant-garde practice. Cannibalism can open up radical new spaces in art for bodies and their environmental interactions, and push against the oppressive pressure of hegemonic Western cultural systems. These transformative possibilities can change our relationship with art, and perhaps with the world itself.

Curated by Ed Gomez, Luis G. Hernandez and Amy Pederson

Fred Alvarado
Natalia Anciso
Marycarmen Arroyo Macias
Ana Baranda
Juan Bastardo
Sergio Bromberg
Helen Cahng
Matthew Carter
Carolyn Castaño
Enrique Castrejon
Michael Dee
Tony de los Reyes
Map Conception:
Deborah Diehl &
Arzu Arda Kosar
Dino Dinco and Rafa Esparza
Veronica Duarte
Martin Durazo
Roni Feldman
Kio Griffith & Carmina Escobar
Zoè Gruni
Ichiro Irie
Daniel Lara
Candice Lin
Juan Luna-Avin
Matt MacFarland
Dominic Paul Miller
Flavia Monteiro
Nancy Popp
Peter Bo Rappmund
Christopher Reynolds
Cindy Santos Bravo
Fidelius X

 

]]> MexiCali Biennial 2013

January 19 to April 13, 2013

The MexiCali Biennial is a dynamic platform for creating new channels of communication between artists and audiences in the US and Mexico. VPAM is proud to host the third MexiCali Biennial that will take place from January 19 to April 13, 2013. The theme of MexiCali 2013 is cannibalism.

The cannibal is a creature that threatens the collapse of identity and ethics, and instills anarchy in the social order. Cannibalism in the New World was one of the central rationales for colonialism, but MexiCali also proposes it as the path forward for a new model of avant-garde practice. Cannibalism can open up radical new spaces in art for bodies and their environmental interactions, and push against the oppressive pressure of hegemonic Western cultural systems. These transformative possibilities can change our relationship with art, and perhaps with the world itself.

Curated by Ed Gomez, Luis G. Hernandez and Amy Pederson

Fred Alvarado
Natalia Anciso
Marycarmen Arroyo Macias
Ana Baranda
Juan Bastardo
Sergio Bromberg
Helen Cahng
Matthew Carter
Carolyn Castaño
Enrique Castrejon
Michael Dee
Tony de los Reyes
Map Conception:
Deborah Diehl &
Arzu Arda Kosar
Dino Dinco and Rafa Esparza
Veronica Duarte
Martin Durazo
Roni Feldman
Kio Griffith & Carmina Escobar
Zoè Gruni
Ichiro Irie
Daniel Lara
Candice Lin
Juan Luna-Avin
Matt MacFarland
Dominic Paul Miller
Flavia Monteiro
Nancy Popp
Peter Bo Rappmund
Christopher Reynolds
Cindy Santos Bravo
Fidelius X

 

]]> http://mexicalibiennial.org/2012/09/18/mexicali-2013-list-of-artists/feed/ 0 2013 MexiCali Biennial Prospectus http://mexicalibiennial.org/2012/03/27/2013-mexicali-biennial-prospectus/ http://mexicalibiennial.org/2012/03/27/2013-mexicali-biennial-prospectus/#comments Tue, 27 Mar 2012 17:08:51 +0000 linen1 http://mexicalibiennial.org/?p=335 The MexiCali Biennial is a dynamic platform for creating new channels of communication between diverse publics within the US and Mexico. It is a vehicle to develop and implement creative research practices and resources for facilitating long-term collaborations that traverse physical, disciplinary and geopolitical borders. MexiCali is a merger of the words Mexico and California. It is a reference to the geographical location, as well as a social and political space that is less of a territory than a deterritorialization. The border here is not a clear demarcation between two zones, but rather a liminal and porous space that colors a region defined by its hybridism—part Mexico, part California and neither entirely.

The first MexiCali Biennial took place in 2006 at La Casa de Tia Tina in Mexicali, Mexico and Chavez Studios in East Los Angeles. We chose to add to an art show a term that came with the baggage of art-world prestige and exhaustion, a Biennial at a time when no one could stand the thought of another one. The aim was to provide artists with an opportunity to respond to and transgress the overarching environmental context of the production and display of their work. At play was an engagement with both the heavily funded and institutionalized Biennial framework within the art world, and the less formal and often more innovative process of bi-national exchange that happens between these regions every day. This connection serves to de-temporalize the regularity of these exchanges, placing time and space into the same liminal and porous position that this reconfiguration of territory represents.

The second MexiCali Biennial took place three years after the first, and was held in four different locations spanning two years and two countries: 2009 at La Casa del Tunel: Art Center in Tijuana, Galeria Comunitaria Mexicali Rose and Sale de Arte de la UABC in Mexicali, and 2010 at the Ben Maltz Gallery, OTIS College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles. This project included the work of 28 artists and collectives, and was the culmination of a year-long dialog about the physical and political realities of crossing cultures, languages, and boundaries. In selecting works submitted through an open call, themes that emerged were the normalization of violence and the disorientation that occurs when one enters into the bleed between these locations.

The third Biennial is scheduled for early 2013 and will engage with the subject of cannibalism. According to Romanian philosopher Catalin Avramescu, the cannibal is a scholarly creature, a thought experiment that interrogates identity on the verge of collapse, posits an ethics without morals, and instills anarchy into the social order. In the West, “the cannibal is the messenger of disorder, the proof that moral chaos has descended upon us, human nature at its worst, the unusable atom of an impossible social order.” Cannibalism in the New World, whether real or imagined, was one of the central moral rationales for colonialism, and it is no accident that the etymological and sociological origins of the cannibal coincide with the discovery of the Americas.

Historically, utopic tendencies in Western modernism have had a forward thrust, projecting into an imaginary space of the future and driven by the forces of technology. By contrast, the Latin American avant garde project of the last century frequently looked to the past, with the seeds of utopia located not in the technological future, but in the purity of the pre-Colombian and autochthonous past. However, these locations are equally phantasmic. The dependence on either trajectory for a post-colonial artistic practice fails because of this historical myopia, a short-sightedness that can only superficially resolve the conflicts inherent within the production of international contemporary art in any location other than the West. This MexiCali Biennial proposes cannibalism as a strategy for the production of a Latin and North American avant garde in the present.

There is no need to draw a line between actual and symbolic anthropophagy; they are part of the same system of meaning. Through ingestion, digestion, and subsumation, the cannibal bridges the gap between political science and moral philosophy, nature and civilization, north and south, east and west, the self and the other. Beyond the boundaries of civilization is an inverted world where all laws are challenged, “…the limit beyond which evil nature becomes visible, whence it came and whither it was summoned to return.”

We take as our inspiration the Brazilian Tropicàlia movement and its anthropophagous tendencies, particularly the work of Hélio Oiticica. Developed in the effervescent cultural climate of the late 1950s, and checked by the military regime of 1968 and the “black years” of institutional violence that followed, Oiticica’s practice opened up radical new spaces in art for bodies and their environmental interactions. These methods of individual and collective production pushed against an aesthetic experience produced by hegemonic cultural and artistic systems, and moved towards a transformation of the world itself. This urgency in regards to transforming the system of art was part of a cultural and political strategy of opposition to forms of oppression within Brazilian life. It was more than just a move towards a plural, open subjectivity, and encompassed ideas of violence, appropriation, and a post-colonial Latin American artistic production burdened by the vocabularies of international contemporary art. The transformative possibilities of the experimental in art were predicated on changing our relationship with art and the world itself. These goals are shared by the MexiCali Biennial. Against the reversible world and objectified ideas. Made into cadavers.

Catalin Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (Princeton, NY: Princeton UP) 2009.
Justin E.H. Smith and Catalin Avramescu, “The Raw and the Cooked: Interview with Catalin Avramescu,” Cabinet 39 (Fall 2010).
Avramescu: 8.
Catherine David, “Hélio Oiticica: Brazil Experiment” in The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Helio Oiticica, and Mira Schendel (Los Angeles, CA: MOCA) 2000.
Oswaldo de Andrade, Manifesto Antropofago (1928).
]]> The MexiCali Biennial is a dynamic platform for creating new channels of communication between diverse publics within the US and Mexico. It is a vehicle to develop and implement creative research practices and resources for facilitating long-term collaborations that traverse physical, disciplinary and geopolitical borders. MexiCali is a merger of the words Mexico and California. It is a reference to the geographical location, as well as a social and political space that is less of a territory than a deterritorialization. The border here is not a clear demarcation between two zones, but rather a liminal and porous space that colors a region defined by its hybridism—part Mexico, part California and neither entirely.

The first MexiCali Biennial took place in 2006 at La Casa de Tia Tina in Mexicali, Mexico and Chavez Studios in East Los Angeles. We chose to add to an art show a term that came with the baggage of art-world prestige and exhaustion, a Biennial at a time when no one could stand the thought of another one. The aim was to provide artists with an opportunity to respond to and transgress the overarching environmental context of the production and display of their work. At play was an engagement with both the heavily funded and institutionalized Biennial framework within the art world, and the less formal and often more innovative process of bi-national exchange that happens between these regions every day. This connection serves to de-temporalize the regularity of these exchanges, placing time and space into the same liminal and porous position that this reconfiguration of territory represents.

The second MexiCali Biennial took place three years after the first, and was held in four different locations spanning two years and two countries: 2009 at La Casa del Tunel: Art Center in Tijuana, Galeria Comunitaria Mexicali Rose and Sale de Arte de la UABC in Mexicali, and 2010 at the Ben Maltz Gallery, OTIS College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles. This project included the work of 28 artists and collectives, and was the culmination of a year-long dialog about the physical and political realities of crossing cultures, languages, and boundaries. In selecting works submitted through an open call, themes that emerged were the normalization of violence and the disorientation that occurs when one enters into the bleed between these locations.

The third Biennial is scheduled for early 2013 and will engage with the subject of cannibalism. According to Romanian philosopher Catalin Avramescu, the cannibal is a scholarly creature, a thought experiment that interrogates identity on the verge of collapse, posits an ethics without morals, and instills anarchy into the social order. In the West, “the cannibal is the messenger of disorder, the proof that moral chaos has descended upon us, human nature at its worst, the unusable atom of an impossible social order.” Cannibalism in the New World, whether real or imagined, was one of the central moral rationales for colonialism, and it is no accident that the etymological and sociological origins of the cannibal coincide with the discovery of the Americas.

Historically, utopic tendencies in Western modernism have had a forward thrust, projecting into an imaginary space of the future and driven by the forces of technology. By contrast, the Latin American avant garde project of the last century frequently looked to the past, with the seeds of utopia located not in the technological future, but in the purity of the pre-Colombian and autochthonous past. However, these locations are equally phantasmic. The dependence on either trajectory for a post-colonial artistic practice fails because of this historical myopia, a short-sightedness that can only superficially resolve the conflicts inherent within the production of international contemporary art in any location other than the West. This MexiCali Biennial proposes cannibalism as a strategy for the production of a Latin and North American avant garde in the present.

There is no need to draw a line between actual and symbolic anthropophagy; they are part of the same system of meaning. Through ingestion, digestion, and subsumation, the cannibal bridges the gap between political science and moral philosophy, nature and civilization, north and south, east and west, the self and the other. Beyond the boundaries of civilization is an inverted world where all laws are challenged, “…the limit beyond which evil nature becomes visible, whence it came and whither it was summoned to return.”

We take as our inspiration the Brazilian Tropicàlia movement and its anthropophagous tendencies, particularly the work of Hélio Oiticica. Developed in the effervescent cultural climate of the late 1950s, and checked by the military regime of 1968 and the “black years” of institutional violence that followed, Oiticica’s practice opened up radical new spaces in art for bodies and their environmental interactions. These methods of individual and collective production pushed against an aesthetic experience produced by hegemonic cultural and artistic systems, and moved towards a transformation of the world itself. This urgency in regards to transforming the system of art was part of a cultural and political strategy of opposition to forms of oppression within Brazilian life. It was more than just a move towards a plural, open subjectivity, and encompassed ideas of violence, appropriation, and a post-colonial Latin American artistic production burdened by the vocabularies of international contemporary art. The transformative possibilities of the experimental in art were predicated on changing our relationship with art and the world itself. These goals are shared by the MexiCali Biennial. Against the reversible world and objectified ideas. Made into cadavers.

Catalin Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (Princeton, NY: Princeton UP) 2009.
Justin E.H. Smith and Catalin Avramescu, “The Raw and the Cooked: Interview with Catalin Avramescu,” Cabinet 39 (Fall 2010).
Avramescu: 8.
Catherine David, “Hélio Oiticica: Brazil Experiment” in The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Helio Oiticica, and Mira Schendel (Los Angeles, CA: MOCA) 2000.
Oswaldo de Andrade, Manifesto Antropofago (1928).
]]> http://mexicalibiennial.org/2012/03/27/2013-mexicali-biennial-prospectus/feed/ 0