About the Show:

NELA OCHOA FROM OUTSIDE TO INSIGHT

For more than two decades, Nela Ochoa has been employing body references in order to portray the movements of society, inviting viewers to reflect about human condition beyond the traditional aesthetic experience. Based in the work of Françoise Delsarte (1811-1871), she has explored the potential of gestures at the same time she pioneered video art in her native land, Venezuela. In this way, Nela Ochoa has created an ‘artistic solar system’ in which the body takes the place of the Sun. Videos, photographs, installations, paintings and sculptures, stand for the orbits, while gestures, radiographs, and genes indicate the planets. Moving around these worlds there are the moons denoted by dance, religion, femininity, violence, ecology and science.

Since the mid-80s, when Ochoa started using and experimenting with video equipment, she has been taking advantage of technological and visual innovations, mostly related to the medical field, such as x-rays, echocardiograms, magnetic resonance images, as well as genomic formulae published and distributed over the Internet.

After exploring Nela Ochoa’s cultural universe, the voyager might discover a dimension where anima and animus maintain a positive balance, where dance and science revolve harmoniously around the body, encountering the body of culture within the body of our time, from the outside to the insight.

Yucef Merhi, Curator

NINA DOTTI CHINA SHIPPING

In an outdoor site-specific installation, China Shipping, Nina Dotti poignantly reflects on key aspects of globalization and its critical consequences. She recreates a China Shipping container where one encounters all sorts of commodities-like-objects ‘Made in China’ that have been bought, found and gathered mostly from her recent trip to Shanghai, China. Dotti exhibits politically charged Chinese/American hilarious artifacts that function as neo ready mades. Various Hollywood films bought in the street of Shangai-9/11, The Break Through, The Devil Wears Prada- in Chinese language are set as commodities. A Chinese wrist watch, in a “Swiss Watch style” presenting a comic like photo of Mao in the background is neatly set in a plastic case.  She also proposes digital photographs in light boxes: Dotti proposes Peacock English cigarettes vignettes made by Xie Xing Long showing romantic style Chinese girls as opposite to the current austere Chinese communist girl stereotype. There are digitally manipulated ads with Chinese babies for adoption from specialized American magazines alluding to the highest consumerism in the American population for Chinese babies, and its potential transformation of the Caucasian traits. Dotti appropriates cultural objects and images transforming them in art commodities in the same spirit that super powers transform cultural and social values into profitable merchandise.

MUU BLANCO ANACHRONIC MODERNISM

 Muu Blanco creates hybrid pieces composed of fragmented and discarded toys and found objects as contemporary neo Duchampian ready-mades. His miniature sculptures conform infant creations of anti-esthetic values. He builds hybrid animal and human-like figures as undisguised and modified objects,  that recall blatant relics from an imaginary archeological site. Muu offers a highly saturated artifact with political charge. The pieces reflect a mortification of a being; somewhat like metamorphosed beasts. Multifarious forms of donkeys, dolls, dogs, horses, combined and transformed into entities of horror; revolt against taste and value markets. Muu dares to create monsters of epic allure. Each piece in its fragmentation and ambivalence collides with commonsense and rationality but it exhibits a fetishistic fascination. Its schizophrenic state narrates the abysses of the subconscious. In that gist, surreal associations come to mind in the most neo Dadaist tradition of the 21st century.