New Works: 05.2

Artpace San Antonio announces the opening of new projects by 05.2 resident artists Jorge Macchi (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Hills Snyder (Helotes, TX), and Anton Vidokle (New York, NY), selected by guest curator Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, Curator, Latin American Art, Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, TX. For New Works: 05.2, Pérez-Barreiro has selected a group of artists whose works alternately address the poetic possibilities of the everyday (Jorge Macchi), the architectural echoes of failed utopian ideals (Anton Vidokle), and the labyrinthine nature of life (Hills Snyder).

About the Artists Multi-media artist Jorge Macchi presents a video installation and two print projects that explore the interdependence of verbal, visual, and sonic narratives. These works employ a formal language that oscillates between dynamism and stillness, progression and perpetuity. The Ends, a five channel video piece, investigates musical compositions arranged by chance. Macchi’s print works explore the contradiction of simultaneous stillness and movement. His Ten Drops flipbook simulates the ever-widening concentric circles of drops falling on the surface of water. In The Ascension, a book resembling sheet music devoid of notes, Macchi plays with the possibilities of movement and sound represented in two dimensions.

Hills Snyder’s work often requires intellectual investment and sometimes compels psychological surrender. Visitors must check their preconceptions at the gallery door to uncover multiple layers of meaning concealed within the spaces, objects, images and texts that comprise Book of the Dead. This installation envelops viewers in an uncanny experience of wonder, terror, and bliss. Rather than merely altering an existing environment, in this project Snyder constructs experience. Themes of life, death, hope, longing, rebirth, and redemption interweave with the artist’s recurring emphasis on participants’ positions of moral, social, and personal responsibility.

Anton Vidokle engages architectural and art historical traditions that evoke the persistence and failures of utopian ideals. At Artpace, Vidokle presents Optica, the final component of a three-part project based on an iconic Mexico City metro station. While his previous two works transform the building’s façade, Óptica turns the camera’s gaze inside out, recreating the building’s modular surface with a massive grid of sixty television screens. Juxtaposing historical utopian intent with contemporary dystopia, Óptica evokes the information and surveillance overload characteristic of our age. It spotlights a place where nothing really happens, yet only architectural infrastructure remains unchanged.

About the Curator Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro was born in Spain and educated in Britain, where he received a PhD in Art History and Theory from the University of Essex, England in 1996. Since 2002 he has served as the Curator of Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, where he recently curated Lo feo de este mundo: Images of the Grotesque. Previously, he served as the Director of Visual Arts at the Americas Society, New York, NY and while there organized projects with Iran do Espirito Santo, Rivane Neuenschwander, Lygia Pape, Geraldo de Barros, and others. Prior to his appointment in New York, Pérez-Barreiro worked at the Casa de América in Madrid, Spain.

Pressetext

New Works: 05.2 - International Artist-In-Residence
Kurator: Gabriel Perez-Barreiro

mit Jorge Macchi, Hills Snyder, Anton Vidokle