calendario eventi  :: 

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23/4/2004

Two exhibitions

Blaffer Gallery, Houston

Daniela Rossell: Ricas Y Famosas
April 24 - June 13, 2004

Daniela Rossell's large, luscious and acutely observed photographs from her notorious series Ricas y famosas (Rich and Famous), created between 1998 and 2002 and published in a book by the same title, afford a rare insider's glimpse into the world of the Mexico's upper class whose ostentatious lifestyles stand in stark contrast to the extreme poverty that characterizes life in Mexico outside their gated mansions.

Rossell's subjects are mostly women, often the artist's personal friends or members of her affluent and powerful family, who posed for her in the extravagant surroundings of their own homes. Rossell stages her photographs with an ethnographer's precision and a cinematographer's aplomb to create powerful images. Her careful compositions are replete with extreme angles and mirrored reflections and establish telling relationships between her characters and their environment. Every decorative detail - from the seemingly omnipresent gilded mirrors and chandeliers and the eclectic mix of architectural citations and faux period furniture, to the idealizing family portraits, the colonies of taxidermist animals and stuffed toy-pets populating every room - speaks of the vulgar excesses, indulgence and self-celebration of extreme but newly gained wealth.

Lacking any historical lineage, Rossell's nouveau-riche subjects claim legitimacy through a compulsory demonstration of buying power and the sheer will to showcase idiosyncrasy through the exoticism of their fairy-tale lifestyles culled from a random set of cultural references indicative of wealth and power. The women portrayed by Rossell seem to live in a world ruled by the adage 'he who dies with the most toys wins,' and as Barry Schwabsky writes in his introduction to Ricas y Famosas, "Just as their wealth allows them to spoil themselves physically, to indulge in a life of conspicuous consumption but also of conspicuous sexuality, it defends them against having to face any antagonistic worldview."

Sex is a clear subtext in these photographs, with the women striking seductive, often provocative, poses and modeling scant or revealing clothing. Rossell describes the images as the result of a close collaboration between photographer and model; the women were free to choose how they wished to be represented. However, if they welcomed photography as a means to reveal their true selves, they quickly limited their self-expression to clichéd poses reinterpreted a million times by film and media. Hollywood and consumerism emerge as the only points of reference for these women caught in the trappings of their own wealth and narcissism. Their self-image and representation is squarely aligned with the likes of movie stars and models. "I like to play with people's conceptions of what a photograph should be," comments Rossell. "The women figure out from magazines and television what they think a photographer should snap, and they start performing."

With the setting of the photographs ultimately more expressive than the characters inhabiting them, Rossell's images also offer a powerful statement about these women's status as dependants, as wives and daughters, and their sense of purpose or lack thereof. As Rossell points out, "wealthy women in Mexico are prisoners of their houses, style and excess. Most of them live in the salon. They really want to look American, like what you see on TV, and they go to a lot of work to accomplish that. It's a kind of hell. There's so much unhappiness among the people who supposedly have everything."

Against the backdrop of Mexican poverty Rossell's images become not only a charged, if ambivalent study of affluence, taste and consumption but also of political corruption and misdemeanor. Although not identified as such by Rossell, who prefers for her subjects to remain anonymous, many of the portrayed are somehow related to members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled and exploited Mexico from 1929 to 2000, while claiming to represent the impoverished populace. They include the son of Carlos Salinas, now living in exile in Ireland for plundering the country's assets for personal gain, and a granddaughter of a former president, Gustavo Días Ordaz, and stepdaughter of Raúl Salinas, brother of Carlos. Her grandfather was the president during the worst civilian massacre in modern Mexico's history (1968) and her stepfather is now in prison accused of murder, money laundering and several other crimes committed during his brother's administration.

The moralizing and political subtext of abiding class disparities is obvious and inescapable. If the allusion to corrupt political governance and the possibly questionable sources of the wealth on display is oblique, the fleet of servant and maids operating in the background serves as a clear reminder of the manpower needed to spin the wheels of the lives of the rich. Yet the pictures are far from being judgmental, rather they reveal the photographer's sympathy with her models. She is, after all, by birth one of them, having grown up on a very ornamented estate with fiberglass replicas of Olmec heads in the garden. But unlike them, Rossell is conscious of the artificially constructed existences of these appointed or self-proclaimed princesses and harem ladies and their complete remove from the everyday reality of life in a Mexico.

Daniela Rossell was born in 1973 in Mexico City. In 1989 she enrolled in acting classes at the Nueclo de Estudes Teatrales, while attending the American School Foundation. In 1993 she took up undergraduate studies of painting at the National School of Visual Arts in Mexico City, but soon dropped out to pursue photography. Since 1996 she has had solo exhibitions in galleries and museums in Mexico City, New York, Miami, Salamanca Munich and San Antonio and numerous group exhibitions all over the world. She lives and works in Mexico City.

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Margo Sawyer: Contemplative Spaces
April 24 - June 13, 2004

Margo Sawyer has traveled the world in an ongoing investigation of the metaphysical qualities of architecture in sacred sites and spaces. Her interest in the architectural sublime of a primarily Eastern tradition can be traced back to her early childhood, marked by extensive travels with her mother within the wider Islamic world. Sawyer speaks of a wartime trip to Egypt in 1973 as a key experience for her artistic awakening. The tourist group she and her mother traveled with was one of the first and few to be allowed into Egypt at the time. The memory of seeing all the ancient historical sites in near solitude resonated into adulthood and her ambitions as an artist: "[It] instilled in me a passion for sculpture, architecture, and painting as an integral whole. Hierarchies of form don't exist in this world... I feel that in some respects this represents the essence of installation art as we know it today."

This kind of installation art stands at the center of Sawyer's practice since she graduated from Yale University in 1982 where she was trained as a sculptor. With her quest for a similarly transporting experience of religious or commemorative architecture in the Western world remaining unfulfilled - she found them to be repressive, mainly motivated by containment, control, isolation and even exclusion - Sawyer turned her attention east. With the help of a number of important grants she spent considerable time in India, Burma, Myanmar, Thailand and Japan, finding inspiration for her own work in the architectural and spiritual practices of Hinduism and Buddhism. Sawyer: "It's about looking at and experiencing sacred architecture, taking note of the ancient world, and using that spatial knowledge in a contemporary framework. I'm very committed to a contemporary vocabulary, but the influences are purely from an ancient context."

When creating her installations Sawyer's focus is the psychological impact of the relationships between space, material and architecture. Her goal is to transform otherwise ordinary materials and secular places into contemplative environments imbued with a spiritual quality that evoke transcendence, a place beyond. Formally she draws on the geometric languages of Russian Constructivism, de Stijl, Bauhaus and Minimalism. She clearly favors what she calls the icons of pure abstraction; most importantly the square and the circle, whose absolute symmetry and closure are at the very core of her vocabulary and form "a collective, a family of shapes that I choose before I begin." The arrangement of her installations speaks of an intuitive approach to geometry which Sawyer readily confirms: "I like the opposition between rigor and intuition. There is a lot of control, repetition, and rigor in the planning of my sculpture, but there is also an openness to chance that occurs when the work is actually put in place. The planning is controlled but the installation is spontaneous."

Blue and Yellow, created six years apart, represent two different solutions to the same problem. Blue, created in 1998, is a dense mosaic of flat wooden panels, boxes, and frames hovering close to the floor and painted in myriad shades of blue with occasional yellows, reds, and greens to enliven the palette. In the words of Dana Friis-Hansen, who commissioned the piece for the Austin Museum of Art, "Blue unfolds at our feet like an ocean, an Oriental carpet, a garden, or a city in miniature." Although the color and expanse of Blue evokes certain aspects of nature, both celestial and aquatic, its building blocks and cumulative structure alludes to an architectural vista. It doesn't come as a surprise then to learn that the piece was inspired by her visit to the Indian city of Jodhpur, where the doors, walls, steps and windows of the plaster houses are painted blue, following both a Brahmin tradition and a recognition of the Hindu god Krishna, whose symbolic color is blue.

Yellow, too, finds inspiration in ancient rites and traditions, relating to the beaded shrouds that ancient Egyptians used to drape their mummies. The installation is composed of solid yellow glass rods of varying length, interspersed with red glass tubes, which are suspended from the ceiling to form a multi-layered curtain. Unlike Blue, which refers to a specific place and reads like a metaphoric cityscape, Yellow renders the concept of transition from one world into another in the materials and the color of the sacred cloth used to dress the dead for their passage. Carrying the guaranteed promise of entry into a spiritual realm, Yellow takes on a jubilant air in its assembly of suspended glass of solid color. Yellow, after all, is the color of gold, of alchemical transformation. Unlike Blue, which sticks close to the ground, Yellow is oriented towards the skies, and while Blue fills the entire room it occupies, Yellow floats within it. If Yellow relates to a moment of passage from the here and now to a realm of otherworldliness, its upward lift reads like an allusion to that other place, above and beyond, but just out of reach. While viewers have to stretch their imagination to explore the wide expanse of Blue, which can only be approached from the margins and thus can never be fully apprehended, visitors in Yellow are encouraged to move along the installation and explore it from different angles. The luminous mesmerizing glass curtain defines an area of concentrated energy hovering in the center of the room. The loose arrangement of the installation allows visitors to peek under and through the layers of glass, but eventually they are denied a full grasp of the world it implies.

Both, Blue and Yellow are imbued with the essence of their name-giving color, yet each has a different material complexity that elicits different responses - intellectually as well as emotionally; above all, it is the atmospheric quality of color which transforms Blue and Yellow into the contemplative spaces from which this exhibition takes it title.

Margo Sawyer was born in 1958 in Washington D.C. In 1980 she graduated from Chelsea School of Art, London, with a B.A. and in 1982 completed her M.F.A. at Yale University. She holds a professorship at the University of Texas at Austin, where she has taught since 1988. She traveled to Southeast Asia on two Fulbright grants and earned fellowships from the American Academy in Rome and the Japan Foundation. She was honored by Art Pace in 2000 and won the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award in 2001. She has had numerous solo shows over the past twenty years including exhibitions in Bombay, New York, Tokyo, Kyoto, Austin, Houston, Galveston, San Antonio, El Paso, and Pittsburgh.

Image: Margo Sawyer, Blue (Detail), 1998

Blaffer Gallery
The Art Museum of the University of Houston, Texas
tel 713.743.9530
fax 713.743.9525

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