July 8, 2006 to August 5, 2006

ABOUT THE SHOW:

Julian Navarro's photography questions the sacred and the profane. Mojo Hand exposes us to a syncretic icon, a cultural artifact, a shielding amulet to battle "bad spirits" that the sages give to their protected in Latin American ancient cultures. The Mojo contains herbs and other mixtures that produce certain protective "energy". Navarro appropriates this ancient relic as a fundamental recovery of primal origins of Latin American syncretic religious and cultural beliefs. The Mojo as a popular relic plays out as a counter cultural object of resistance to intellectual and rational Western paradigm. In the photographs the hands are protagonist entities handling the Mojo in expressionistic gestures. They posture pathos or ethos in arbitrary laconic movements through out a Caravaggio-like strong chiaroscuro. The Mojo-Hand show constitutes a personal narrative that works also as a metaphor for a highly hybridized global culture.

Milcho (Veronica Milchorena) proposes a video-installation that performs with the last ten days of the artist's grandmother. The work is a testimony to loss and nostalgia, and a vision of death and mortality. Milcho, a film and TV director-, gathers in her video a poetic recital of her grandmother, who diligently throws out forceful phrases of a poem written by the artist. The theatrical vocals of her frail grandmother point us out of our own life fleeting mortality. Milcho, accentuating the hyper reality of her work, sets out an installation with the belongings of her grandmother. At the center of it there is a mannequin dressed with grandmother's clothes. Her real bird is in a cage, her dolls, her books, and papers are set on her night tables in horrified personal paraphernalia. Interplay between fiction and simulacrum is set. This work reflects on the critical cycles of life: age, illness and decadence.

Ana I Martinez proposes a set of photographs with virtual movement. Through the use of LEDs in the frame of the photo, the artist creates an optical illusion of movement. The artist uses appropriated photo images or her own photos, which she intervenes and completely transforms with Photoshop effects. The figures are linearly designed and synthetic, in form of dancing silhouettes. It must be underlined the artist's achievement of this original technicality applied to photography. Nevertheless, Martinez goes beyond this point and puts forth a deep conceptual ideology on femininity. In the show she creates nine feminine typologies based on the Enneagram system. Each woman outlines a character with a singular "allure" and sensuality. The photographs envision an iconographic new alphabet of contemporary and dynamic womanhood.