NATURALEZA BIEN MUERTA

VERY STILL LIFE

[ENG]
Very still lifes
is a series of installation works of sound and sculpture to unquiet what seems still.
The title is taken from a small quote from the edges of a page of Frida Kahlo's diaries that refers with humour to the style of painting known as 'still life', "depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which are either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, shells, etc.) or man-made (drinking glasses, books, vases, jewelry, coins, pipes, etc.)" where "images that rely on a multitude of still-life elements ostensibly to reproduce a 'slice of life'" are composed in a bidimensional plane "which intends to deceive the viewer into thinking the scene is real," "usually showing inanimate and relatively flat objects." -quoting wikipedia.

With this definition into account, the works "compose" a still life with elements that could seem to fit to this definitions but rather enlarge their boundaries: a series of instruments from the collection of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico from different origins and cultures, some of them dating 1500 old or more, that can hold different identities at once: flower-flutes, dog-whistles, trumpet-shells, vessel-rattle-burial-shakers, fruit-seeds-rattles, or snake-bone-scrapers, just to name a few.

Each of these works dialogue with precolonial explorations of the "still life" to make questions on the notions of nature and culture founded in the late XIX and early XX centuries in Mexico, attempting to enlarge those historical positions through the body of the original instruments by bringing their sounds into space, the "flatness" of their archive documentation taking the perspective of the camera's eye into volume and the use materials into wider expressions of the innanimate (an eye stone, a black mirror crystal of the self, a charcoal that blossoms...) "configuring a tridimensional still life that challenges the formal conventions of painting. The visitor has the possibility to transit and listen to the works, and therefore to break a fixed point, a linear perspective and a distance between object and subject." - Fernanda Ramos, curator.



Naturalezas bien muertas es una serie de instalaciones de sonido y escultura para agitar lo que parece estar quieto.
El título de la obra rescata una pequeña nota a la orilla de una página del diario de Frida Kahlo al que se refiere con humor al estilo de pintura conocido como "naturaleza muerta", "representando principalmente objetos inanimados como material de estudio, siendo típicamente objetos comunes ya sean naturales (comida, flores, animales muertos, plantas, piedras, conchas, etc.) o hechos por el humano (vasos, libros, jarrones, joyería, monedas, pipas, etc.)" donde "imágenes que se basab en una multitud de elementos de naturaleza muerta aparentan reproducir un 'pedazo de vida'" compuestos sobre un plano bidimensional "que intenta engañar al espectador para hacerlo pensar que la escena es real," "usualmente mostrando objectos inanimados y relativamente planos." -citando a wikipedia.

Obra seleccionada

~Selected works
Largo Aliento

[Long breath]
Naturaleza bien muerta

[Very still life]
Witness Trees, Smith Gallery, Davidson, NC

Sept 2022 - Dec 2022
Psalmodia Naturalis (in xóchitl, in cuícatl)

[Psalmodia Naturalis (in xóchitl, in cuícatl)]
canto llano cuenca valle

[songs of plain river basin valley]
Canto llano cuenca valle, CCUTlatelolco

Jul 2021 - Jul 2022
Pinturas Perdidas

[Lost Paintings]
Temporal

[Tempest]
Sincronía

[Synchrony]
Sublevación, después de Ximeno y Planes (reconstrucción, destrucción y fragmentos)

[Uprising, after Ximeno y Planes (reconstruction, destruction and fragments)]
Negación

[Negation]
Reloj de Pulsos

[Pulse Clock]
Invocaciones

[Invocations]
Des/aparecer

[Dis/appear]
Carbón

[Carbon]
Estructuras Invisibles

[Invisible Structures]
Réplica

[Replicare]
Acústica Concreta

[Concrete Acoustics]
Aquellos que dijeron nuestras cosas antes que nosotros

[Those who said our things before us]
Réplicas: Apuntes sobre historia material, Museo ExTeresa Arte Actual, Ciudad de México

Dic 2017 - May 2018
Apuntes sobre historia material (un organismo museo)

[Notes on material history (a museum organism)]
Campana Perdida

[Lost Bell]
Esculturas Perdidas

[Lost Sculptures]
Concrete: Turning something invisible into matter, Meinblau, Berlin

Ago 2016 - Sept 2016
[silencio]

[silence]
500 años (Ciudad de México, 1515-2015)

[500 years (Mexico city, 1515-2015)]
Tiempo Universal Coordinado

[Coordinated Universal Time]