Photography is a Latin American Celebration: One More Thing Curated by Deborah Mesa-Pelly.
Message from Curator
“The conceit for this show is built around a photograph with a message on the verso that Felix Gonzalez-Torres mailed me, back in 1995. I was a photography student at the time in the Yale MFA program and had invited him to be part of a lecture series in the photography department. The image is part of his correspondence archive, a 4x6 snapshot of a cat and handwritten note spoke of his art practice, his humor, and generosity. It also spoke of a much more expansive use of the photographic image that left an indelible mark on me.
This group exhibition continues my interests in the inventive and unpredictable ways in which photography can communicate information. The artists in this exhibition, all of whom are of Latinx / American heritage and backgrounds weave personal perspectives with humor, intimacy, and chance.
Since its inception, photography has had a plasticity, a fluidity of purpose and function. Suited for a shifting variety of applications, from the explicative to its appropriation, from the assumed reality to its abstraction. The idea of multiple simultaneous possibilities is at the center of this exhibition. “
One More Thing, exhibition text by John Connelly.
Many young artists who consider themselves Felix Gonzalez-Torres enthusiasts might not be aware that he was, at heart, a photographer. After all, he received an MFA from the International Center for Photography in New York in 1987 and presented exquisite suites of traditionally printed and framed black & white photographs in the final bodies of work he completed before his untimely death in 1996. However, today, it is his candy spills, printed stacks of paper, beaded curtains, word portraits, and light strings for which he may be most associated. But in the final two years of his life, Gonzalez-Torres intentionally embraced his photographic origins, ceasing production of some of his most iconic series of works and returned to the wall with images he had captured on a camera using analog 35 mm film. I was fortunate enough to work with Gonzalez-Torres for two years before he died and witnessed his editing process of those photographs, sublime black & white images of birds or clouds in the sky, symbolic of travel and time and often featuring pointed subjects such as vultures or footprints in the sand.
The photograph had been a core part of Felix's work all along, as witnessed throughout his series of jigsaw puzzles from 1987-1992. These consisted of personal, found, or family photos or letters from his lover that were rephotographed and then dropped off for processing by a commercial lab into the format of memorabilia. They also became large-scale works, like his well-known bed billboard, that were cropped and blown up from black and white 8 x 10" prints and installed in diverse public landscapes. They can even be found slyly tucked away behind some of his bloodwork drawings or embedded with multiple objects between a stack of black rubber welcome mats. It is touching that Gonzalez-Torres used his casual snapshots as a form of correspondence and telling that his generosity, humor, intensity, and integrity were so clearly communicated by the juxtaposition of the images on these snapshots and his written word like the one Ms. Mesa-Pelly received. (i.e., a playfully arranged selection of his mid-century rubber toy collection or pictures of his beloved cats). The fact that The Archives of American Art is serving as the leading repository for the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Correspondence Archive, preserving original letters, postcards, and snapshots with notes like the one that inspired this exhibition is admirable since they share a rich relationship with his work and will undeniably benefit future scholarship.
As Deborah Mesa-Pelly thoughtfully posits in her exhibition thesis statement for the group exhibition "One More Thing," what are the "continued inventive and unpredictable ways in which photography can communicate information"? Positioned as part of a symposium questioning the medium's position in the 21st century, I imagine questions about how we frame the ideas around photography in a "digital", “AI” or "post-internet" age colliding with questions of what it means to be a "photographer" today, tied with discussions whether such labels are even relevant. For instance, a talented art friend of mine refers to her practice as “lens-based”, or on a recent studio visit, an artist referred to themselves, interestingly, as a "camera less photographer" and cited re-reading Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others as a recent inspiration. So how do we move past the essential theories of the last century, such as Roland Barthes's identification of the "punctum" and the "studium," and digest the fact that the physical act of taking someone's picture can still be read in the 21st century as a violent act?
When questioning these issues, I like to reflect on Gonzalez-Torres's philosophy of being keenly invested in the nature of the photographic image while continually questioning the implications of reproduction and its relationship to truth. I also wonder how Gonzalez-Torres would have addressed the 21st-century developments of this thoroughly modern medium within his work. In a 1993 interview with Joseph Kosuth, he said "art is like an antenna of what's going on in culture, what's really going on and what's going to come out of it."[1] He also embraced the Brechtian concepts that it is essential "to keep a distance and allow the viewer, the public, time to reflect and think" and "more than anything break the pleasure of representation, the pleasure of the flawless narrative."[2] Gonzalez-Torres firmly believed that change is the only thing that is constant, but with change comes the risk of disintegration and dislocation, so we must continue to embrace and embed the concept of change into art to move forward, survive, and adapt.
-John Connelly, ‘90
[1] “A Conversation, Joseph Kosuth and Felix Gonzalez-Torres,” in Felix Gonzalez-Torres. ed. Julie Ault (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2006), p. 353. The conversation was recorded in Kosuth’s New York studio on October 10, 1993 and first published in A. Reinhardt, J. Kosuth, F. Gonzalez-Torres: Symptoms of Interference, Conditions of Possibility (London: Academy Editions,1994) pp.76-81.
[2] Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Interview by Tim Rollins, in Felix Gonzalez-Torres (New York: A.R.T. Press,1993), excerpted in Felix Gonzalez-Torres. ed. Julie Ault (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2006), p.69.
Artists
Deborah Mesa-Pelly is a photographer and SUNY Purchase alumnus (BFA Photography and Printmaking, ‘91), Solo shows have been organized at Honey Ramka Gallery, New York, Lombard Fried Gallery, New York, Centro de Fotografia, Salamanca, Spain and Forefront Gallery at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, New York, Galerie Anne Villepoix, Paris, France, and Lombard Fried Fine Arts, New York.
Florencia Escudero’s (b. 1987, Singapore, grew up in Mendoza, Argentina) sculptures include soft and handmade components printed with digitally-rendered imagery. Feminist theory, cyber culture, and an embrace of various techniques such as digital photo collage, hand sewing, and silk-screening place each sculpture in the realm of both the machine-made and the handmade.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres (b. 1957, Guåimaro, Cuba – d. 1996 Miami, Fl) was one of the most significant artists to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Gonzalez-Torres had an ongoing practice of sending correspondence to a range of people, including friends, individuals from the art world (such as collectors and curators) with whom he both intimately and casually engaged, and family. This correspondence practice is rich in its own right, and also sheds light on both Gonzalez-Torres’s interest in the complexity of multiple points of view and a nuanced relationship to his art making practice.
Matt Keegan (b. 1976, Manhasset, New York) investigates how we make sense of our world thru images and what does it mean to use a photograph or an image as a placeholder for language. Since 2010, Keegan has referred to a specific deck of ESL flashcards handmade by his mother, a first generation Cuban American and native Spanish speaker, for use as a teaching tool. Although the flash cards present photographs and videos that are open to interpretation, they are stand-ins for specific language and phrases found on the reverse side.
Deborah Mesa-Pelly’s (b. 1968, Havana, Cuba) photographs and photo sculptures employ mirrored surfaces to create a multiplicity of shifting images that evoke permanence and impermanence. As if in a hall of mirrors, the photographic representation is now disorientated as its dimensionality is extended and fractured.
Abelardo Morell’s (b. 1948, Havana, Cuba) photographs transform and transcend the ordinary and the everyday. Intrigued with optics and how an image is constructed, Morell’s diverse subject matter and approaches are united by the artist’s constant experimentation with optics and exploring new ways of constructing images. In one of his most enduring bodies of works, known as his camera obscura series, Morell reinvigorates the earliest discoveries in optics with a contemporary vision.
Rachelle Mozman Solano (b. 1972, New York, NY) creates photographs and videos that “intersect document, narrative and performance. She is fascinated with ideas of ethnography and her work engages themes around family, class and color divides”. Her well celebrated series Casa de Mujeres, explores these themes with not only a painter’s eye, but with layered and nuanced reflections that speak to our humanness.