DaWire

Continuing our one year celebration, today we are revisiting an article by our contributing writer in Mexico City Alejandro Sordo-Guzmán on the work of Hector Falcón. The book, its uses and transmutation by the hand of the artist into an art object makes us reflect further about how the act of mutilation turns into one of discovery.

On July 26th 2009, I founded DaWire to provide a serious platform for emerging writers and artists. The idea started in San Juan, with one single essay, and with a lot of motivation to accomplish something different from what was already around. After arriving in Puerto Rico after 12 good years abroad, my good friend and artist Catherine Matos Olivo suggested I write an essay about her work for publication in the visual arts section of Small Axe curated by Christopher Cozier. I accepted and embarked on a series of writings on Puerto Rican emerging artists that included Josué Pellot and Jason Mena.

Performance art lends itself to the utilization of the body as a resource, a space for discussion and a mechanism for discourse. Regina José Galindo is a Guatemalan performance artist that uses her body to denounce social and political injustices, but also to address issues related to sexuality and women.[...]

For today’s installment of Sexual Deployment: The Body as Method for Discourse we present work from artist Janine Antoni. Antoni utilizes her body as both a mechanism for making art and an art object. Antoni sculpts with her teeth and even paints with her hair, exploring the physicality of the body as well as social and cultural constructions of femininity.[...]

The title Sexual Deployment is taken from Michel Foucault’s seminal work The History of Sexuality, where he analyzes the politics of power surrounding our approach to sexuality. In it, Foucault defines what he calls ‘the deployment of alliance’ and ‘the deployment of sexuality,’ two opposing systems that address sexuality in completely different ways and where power is a game that centers on the body.[...]

We want to provide our readers with more than just news on artists and exhibitions, that’s why once a month we will bring you one full week dedicated to a particular theme or subject, presenting contemporary artists within a curatorial, conceptual or theoretical framework. Sexual Deployment: The Body as Method for Discourse presents five women artists that use their bodies as a political and social space to address issues of sexuality, feminism and femininity.[...]

Ivelisse Jiménez uses painting as a point of departure to construct pieces that deal with the idea of simultaneity and contradiction. The manner in which objects, images and materials are articulated questions the hierarchies of what is most present.[...]