Possible Immanents: Ceramic Fabulations
Curaduría por Mariana Lagunes
Exhibition
-> Oct 22 2022 – Dec 4 2022
Avant.Dev presents Possible Immanents: Ceramic Fabulations curatorial project by Mariana Lagunes exhibiting fine-art works by Mexican artists and ceramicists: Sandra Sánchez, Lupe Quesada, Daniela Placenciae, María Naidich, Pop Dots: Melissa Aldrete + Luis Cárdenas, Marisol Monroy Rocha , Andrea Alzati and Yadira Garcia Rubio.
Things with power demand attention, exude a kind of dignity, provoke poetry or inspire fear – Jane Bennett
Exhibition with demonstrations of conceptual evolutions between natural processes of technological and experimental innovation in ceramics.
This exhibition brings together sculptural ceramic pieces made by Mexican artists and potters who have a ceramic conceptual language in common. The curatorial project is based on the interest of addressing the issue of ceramic materiality to reflect on it as an agent that flows in an organic being, which is potentially capable of promoting the life of another; of what is shaped or germinated, from a deployment that is its own and that goes from the epistemological to the most sensitive.
— Mariana Lagunes
Participating artists:
Sandra Sánchez writes in different media, including ceramics.
Her current research focuses on modes of collaborative writing and proposals for production and reception beyond the aesthetic relationship "artist-work-spectator". In 2015 she founded Zona de Desgaste, a space dedicated to mediation, writing and critical reflection on contemporary art and art philosophy. She currently edits OndaMx magazine, directs Aeromoto Library and is professor at the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana.
“The thought is usually related to the written language and the concept. In my work I seek to break that mythology by establishing that thought does not exclude the written word, without being reduced to it; Thought consists not only of meanings but of statements, illocutions, rhythms, enigmas, gaps, lines, fluids, surfaces, bodies, signifiers, pilgrimages, and conscious and unconscious experiences.”
The artistic commitment consists of proposing exercises, essays, poems, writing machines, alphabets (without alpha and beta) with materials that exceed the sheet of paper and that allow playing with the volume, density, porosity and skin of thought , such as ceramics, threads, needles, enamels and powders. Sandra proposes for this exhibition a series of sculptures that are based on the intersection with the word, writing, language and the possible meanings in the plasticity of ceramics, as a way in which the body supports a whole series of relationships and possibilities of be. For Sandra, language has limits that ceramics can embody and that is a memory that is built from the logic of touch and affection.
Guadalupe Quesada, Mexico City, 1988. She graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts in Paris (2014), she also studied a semester at Musashino Art University in Tokyo (2012). Her ceramic sculptures are a reflection on her perspectives and relativity, her thought that drives her to imagine alternative realities. She has participated in various exhibitions in Brussels, Paris, London, Los Angeles, Miami, San Antonio and Mexico City. She currently lives and works in Mexico City.
“The intriguing complexity of the universe, its wide spectrum of living beings and its overwhelming strangeness are the starting point of a reflection on relativity and our perceptions that drives me to imagine alternative realities. The lithographs of the biologist Ernst Haeckel, the extraterrestrial life shown in science fiction films as well as the Buddhist teachings on the void are influences and triggers of my artistic practice. Through the observation and reinterpretation of biological phenomena, such as microorganisms and fungi, I decompose, divide, merge and rearrange forms to create hybrid creatures, fantastic entities; I play with the infinite possibilities of what could exist beyond our sensory field and preconceived limits. We identify and categorize everything we perceive using our conceptual denominations and collective agreement. We create a reality based on relative concepts when in reality the identity of the objects arises from causes, temporary and subjective conditions, circumstances and the point of view and socialization of the observer. If objects were permanent and endowed with intrinsic reality, they would appear in the same way to all perceivers. No phenomenon possesses substantial qualities and nothing exists as it appears: objectively and independently of our own mind. The shapes I create, strange and almost alien, although they don't fit into our categories, they still have a familiarity. I intend to communicate with my work that there is a greater diversity of life in our universe that is not limited by our minds. By blurring our preconceived categories, these creatures show us how life is a continuum where we are just one possibility.”
Born in the Yaqui Valley in 1993. Studies for a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Hermosillo, Sonora. She has completed various studies at academies such as Lorenzo di Medici in Florence and the New York Academy of Arts. Residency in Guadalajara in 2017. Selected in the 8th Diploma in production of visual arts projects at the San Agustin Arts Center in 2019. Residency in Tajo Taller Cdmx in 2021. Collective exhibition ̈(Autoengaño...) ̈ at Galería Aguirre Cdmx in 2022. Collective exhibition “This (supposly) must be the place” with Visa Projects in New York 2022. Collective exhibition “It is still time” in District 60 in 2022.
Collective exhibition in "Dialogos" in gallery El compound in CdMx in 2022. Her most recent production is focused on revaluing the culture of pottery in a more comprehensive way, studying the regional material and the cosmology that takes place in Sonora.
María Naidich (MEX) 1991, is an artist and researcher. Her work addresses issues
related to nostalgia for a place, archeology and nature and itstaming her. María is currently developing a fabulous project on places and landscapes created from the historical, the personal and the magical.
“I am interested in the forms and tools with which the (exoticized) collective imaginary has been built about nature, places, phenomena and objects at the limit of what is established as natural and artificial. In my practice, I question these limits imposed from a Eurocentric and anthropocentric episteme through speculative storytelling. Which leads me to suggest alternatives to this hegemonic discourse mainly in two ways: resorting to knowledge from other times and geographies on other ways of conceiving nature and non-human beings. And betting on sensitive and metaphorical ways of approaching matter, renaming things, conjuring up objects and building alternative narratives, which I generally materialize in multimedia installations with objects, glass, texts, light and sound that aim to generate complete atmospheres.”
María has a master's degree with honors in Art and Literature Studies from the UAEM in Morelos and a bachelor's degree from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She is currently a FONCA Young Creators Fellow in Alternative Media and Performance and was recently selected for the 2022 Pilchuck Scholarship Program in Seattle, United States. Her work has been exhibited in individual and collective exhibitions inside and outside of Mexico; Tlaxcala3 (Mexico City, 2022), Salón Acme (Mexico City, 2022 and 2019), Galleri Q (Copenhagen, 2018), HANGAR Barcelona (Barcelona, 2017), Oude Kerk (Amsterdam, 2016) and the De Brakke Cultural Center Grond (Amsterdam, 2015) among others. In 2014 she was artist-in-residence at the Tsarino Foundation in Bulgaria.
Pop Dots: Melissa Aldrete + Luis Cardenas
Ceramic study that is founded as an alloy between curiosity and work by hand. Melissa Aldrete and Luis Cárdenas founded popdots in 2012, with the sole purpose of expressing the memorability of typical materials in a contemporary context. What the studio seeks is to strengthen the process and the concept, in order to provoke the development of unique and infinite series. that increase the mastery and understanding of the ceramic material.
“The studio has made installations and interventions that maintain experimentation and the continuous search for dialogue between the material, the being and its environment. Collaboration, research and exploration are the main ingredients that give life to each of their projects.”
Marisol Monroy (Puebla, México.1987) is a visual artist and cultural manager. She currently resides in Mexico City. She studied Plastic Arts at the National University Institute of Art in Buenos Aires Argentina and later at UNARTE Puebla. She has been a fellow at the UNAM University Museum of Contemporary Art where she taught Video Art courses for children. From 2017 to 2020 she directed the Let There Be Art art gallery in Mexico City, in 2017 she created the Obra Negra Gallery, currently she directs and manages Casa Taller.
“My exploration in ceramics arises from an interest in social bonds around creative and exploratory processes of the material. I try to delve into the meanings that arise from the relationship of thought/emotion and creation as a form of interpersonal listening. My work is motivated by my own experience of opening my house as a workshop to jointly develop creative procedures. I am interested in the relationships that arise between the place we inhabit and the ways in which they limit or expand us, I like to think of the function of the house as a container of open spaces.”
Marisol makes ceramic pieces that explore, based on what is useful, other possibilities of clay that determine techniques and materials. Her ceramic practice lies in the processual exploration between her body and clay as an essential dialogue for creation.
Poet and visual artist. She lives and works in Mexico City. She has an interest in calligraphy, religious and sacred motifs, and mystical experience. She was a fellow of the FONCA Young Creators program in the discipline of poetry 2016-2017. She has published two books of poetry and an artist's book.
Alzati makes ceramic pieces related to his way of writing poetry and the line in relation to the body. She generates speech from extremities like hands or feet.
Master in Visual Arts, with the Management-Production concept: strategies to materialize artistic projects in independent spaces, she has managed different artistic projects in Mexico and Spain. Her interests in the production process and her imagination are related to objects, their composition and functionality. She currently develops the Leather Hardness project; her production and experimentation with ceramics, techniques and materials, she simultaneously works in the area of cinematographic art.
— Avant.Dev