DaWire

Melissa Brown

La importación de talentos fue exitosa en dosis triple con la iniciativa de Alexis Figueroa y su proyecto Trailer Park Proyects, quien en colaboración con Galería Roberto Paradise, presentaron el pasado jueves, 27 de septiembre de 2012 tres aperturas simultáneas: “Purple Buff” de Summer Wheat, “King’s Park” de Melissa Brown, y el solo show del primer artista residente de Trailer Park Proyects de Tim Bergstrom. Read the rest of this post »

My first encounter with Zoe Leonard’s work was, paradoxically, with her writing. I say paradoxically because Leonard is mostly known for her photographs and not for her writings. However, I met her work reading her 1992 piece, published for the first time in LTTR No. 5, 2006, “I want a president…”, a passionate, thoughtful and direct claim for civil disobedience and political responsibility. A commitment to humans and cities and our right over our political existence. Read the rest of this post »

Chaveli Sifre. No.1125, PerFumes series, digital collage

While there exists endless research, and countless indexes and catalogs surrounding an artist’s quantifiable completed work, unrealized or half-baked utopian ideas abandoned at the worktable rarely make the cut or wander into discourse. But it’s these overtly utopian ideas—the unattainables—that would seemingly contextualize that oeuvre that comes to define the names attached to them. Read the rest of this post »

Maja Ruznic

This past August 9^th as part of its monthly activities Trailer Park Proyects opened two new individual exhibitions: “Conglomeraciones Cínicas” by Ivan Girona and “Messengers” by Maja Ruznic. Both exhibitions were presented in individual trailers so as to provide each artist an individual and separate space. Read the rest of this post »

Javier Bosques. Nueve Policías, 48” x 56”, 35mm photo in digitial C-Print

What is gained by the aesthetization of crime, politics and/or activism? In Puerto Rico, just as in many other countries around the world, many visual artists are preoccupied with the political issues at hand; not in an utopic attempt to find solutions to the problems, but rather to use art as a mirror in which, hopefully, we can see ourselves, each other and our surroundings. For Puerto Ricans, crime and politics are without a doubt an inescapable reality of everyday life. In his seminal essay on the continuous conundrum of Puerto Rican identity published in 1934 titled Insularismo, Antonio S. Pedreira  eloquently states that “since we breathe politics and live politics… we have developed an electoral attitude to measure things”[1] More than 75 years later not much has changed. Read the rest of this post »

Roberto Paradise at Josh Lilley

Nayda Collazo-Llorens, REVERB, Installation View.

Medios y Ambientes includes the work of eight artists who use and expand notions of space to challenge the preconceived limits of objects and artistic mediums. Working in diverse techniques and media such as painting, photography, mixed media sculpture, video, architecture and installation, the work proposes the spectator relationship as a central theme by creating diverse environments of total immersion. Read the rest of this post »

“The body can be compared to a work of art.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Guillermo Álvarez Charvel uses a simple folding of a sheet of paper as a fundamental creative act for the composition of objects from books and documents of encyclopedic knowledge inherited from scientific rationalism and positivism which surfaced during modernity. He composes a work by a process of transfiguration that changes the form of perception, from the two-dimensional flat format of a publication on paper, to a new form with volume. The drawing gives the invisible visible existence, reveals a world resting on experience – in this case, the experience of the perceptible body in the senses through the sensations. Read the rest of this post »

Installation View. The Thousand and One Nights.

There are times when unexpectedly an artist breaks away from a trend. Puerto Rico, an island with many creative minds but few institutional frameworks to support them, has been recently the site for works that either confront its ambiguous political situation, rather directly and simplistically, or limit themselves to trivial representations of tropical clichés and its derivative forms. It is precisely in these characteristics that this exhibition stands out. Currently an MFA candidate at the San Francisco Art Institute, Raquel Torres-Arzola, who has been working under the tutelage of her advisor artist Victor Vázquez, has put together a thought provoking and intelligent exhibition at AREA that addresses domestic as well as dogmatic power structures, but also posits sculpture as a formal and conceptual language of materials by which the intangible is materialized. Read the rest of this post »

Visiting artist Tim Portlock talks to La Práctica about the relationship between his work and the conventions of 19th century American painting traditions. 2012

Beta-Local is an organization and a physical space in San Juan, Puerto Rico founded in 2009 and devoted to aesthetic thought and practice. Most of what Beta-Local does comes out of three main programs: La Práctica, an interdisciplinary production-based fellowship program, The Harbor, an artist residency program in support of La Práctica, and La Ivan Illich, an open school. Read the rest of this post »