The first exhibition of Yuri Pattison in Mexico @LABOR; crisis cast.
Pattison's work explores the multiple relationships between visual cultures, space, communication technologies and the circulation of information.
Pattison uses digital technology to investigate the political and social ramifications of the rapid development of technology and the depth of visual culture in the Internet age. His physical works take advantage of the space outside the web to explore the notions of open communication and the flexibility of labor borders in the modern workspace. The artist creates complex scenarios to construct narratives with fictitious scripts that lean towards the theory of conspiracy and the Science fiction.
In public solitude (crisis cast), Yuri Pattison explores the impact of contemporary technologies on discourses of personal and national security. The advance of high-resolution imaging, social networking and nanotechnology have transformed the ways in which governments and private entities attempt to address anxieties generated by high profile incidents of terrorism and the endless flood of information that ensues from such events. The expanded news cycle created by web-based broadcasting platforms has created an environment in which unitary narratives about events have been replaced by an often overwhelming multiplicity of perspectives and opinions. In such an information ecology, the chasm Jean Baudrillard identified between “information” and “meaning” has grown exponentially. Into this rupture have poured an endless parade of civilian journalists, social media influencers, as well as charlatans seeking to exploit points of information arbitrage.
If terror is an aesthetic event, so then is the prevention of terror. The increasing ubiquity of security cameras in public spaces is accompanied by an aesthetics of security involving numerous practically useless “security” procedures being performed because they create a nebulous atmosphere of safety. The relentless documentation of public spaces and security procedures has created a similar surfeit of imagery and discursive fracturing. Conspiracy theories surrounding disaster preparedness videos involving governments and private contractors have become as prevalent as the images themselves.
The question of how risk and security are understood is one of the oldest in modern political thought. To model risk, one must have some conception of what is placed at risk, this is often a highly materialized process.
Pattison’s works seek to make visible the vectors of these decisions. In the work that lends its title to the exhibition, Pattison collaborated with a private security firm called CrisisCast to visualize both the visual dimensions of disaster preparedness and the underlying technical infrastructure. Pattison commissioned CrisisCast to produce the preparedness scenario featured in the public solitude video. The firm’s founders use their background as theatre-makers to devise plausible scenarios in which “crises” could emerge.
Guillaume Leblon
AEROSOL
Opening: September 7, 2019
On View: September 7 – October 25
Written by: Miguel Ochoa
Since the beginning of the 2000’s, Guillaume Leblon has explored the expanded field of sculpture. Through his diverse practice, ranging from sculpture and site-specific installations to film and performance, and his astute manipulation of the built environment, Leblon has acquired a prominent position in the contemporary art world.
Leblon’s oeuvre sketches an intriguing world that shifts between abstraction and figuration while questioning the ceaseless tension between materiality and immateriality, appearance and disappearance, creation and destruction. Leblon manipulates shapes and segments borrowed from the everyday, including natural, domestic, autobiographical and architectural habitats so as to evoke the uncanny and ephemeral and to affect as well as stimulate spatial and temporal perceptions.
Although Leblon’s objects are designed as conceptual structures, they often function on a poetic level. In his universe, the familiar grows unfamiliar and immediately recognizable references turn emblematic and metaphorical. In so doing, he avoids intellectual determinism and encourages multiple readings based on personal experiences.
Leblon first show in Mexico is called AEROSOL. The title comes from the inherent structure of this material: the suspension of fine solid or liquid particles in gas, smoke or fog that mist the atmosphere and flood the space, not a void but the cohesive force that constructs the materiality of the show.
TEXT BY: M. OCHOA
Indebted to the premises of minimalism and conceptualism, Santiago Sierra (Madrid, 1966) has produced a body of work shaped through sculpture, documentation, public acts, film projects, and photography to reveal the perversity of power and the capitalist system. Through his work, Sierra forces the spectator to experience the brutal nature of reality in light of the scenes he recreates; his strategy is to repeat the power operations that he himself criticizes.
52 lienzos expuestos al aire de la Ciudad de México is composed of 52 canvases with an adhesive that were located reposing on the floor ready to receive whatever the environment might bring. Every week during a year, one canvas was removed, and taken to a conservationist to seal the contaminants captured by these witnesses of the precipitous decline of air conditions in Mexico City’s notoriously polluted environment. —A blight that earned the capital the dubious distinction of most polluted megacity on the planet in 1992*.
52 lienzos expuestos al aire de la Ciudad de México not only refers to Mexico, as the rest of the world’s urban areas and their associated congestion continues to expand, most countries are witnessing increases in airborne contaminants, from noxious gases such as nitrogen oxides and ozone to fine particulate matter such as dust, soot, and nanospheres of metals that penetrate deep into the human body.
Time being a crucial element of this equation, the piece brings a sentiment of urgency that supports the militant voices of our time.
The World Health Organization’s officials gathered blunt data in the same scientific manner as this oeuvre. Statistics show that polluted air is implicated in more than 7 million premature deaths per year, visually this piece manifests this process.
Beatriz Zamora
Nicholas Managan / Termite Economies