DaWire

Hey there! Below you can find the catalogue essay for the exhibition The Dialectic City: Document | Context that closed last November at Laboratorio de Artes Binarios. Enjoy! -Carla Acevedo-Yates “To capture a city in an image means following its movement.” Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant The city is comprised of colliding elements; conflicting mechanisms that through [...]

Jason Mena, untitled (destruction is no longer an uncalculated event), digital print on tempered glass, used tires and paper, 2010

For his first major solo show at Luis Adelantado Gallery in Valencia, Spain, Jason Mena constructs a visually engaging landscape that ranges from discarded tires to sublime skyscapes. The exhibition, titled We all shall play in the ruins, displays a sense of faux urgency arising from current events, reflecting on subjects such as destruction, waste, pollution and its paradoxically sublime effects. Transforming a seemingly ugly and distasteful object or image into a thing of beauty seems to be Mena’s predominant predilection.[...]

What happens if we look directly at the sun? The reflections of our bright star allow us to see things, colors and forms. The illumination produced on the objects makes them visible to our eyes and allows us to establish a multiplicity of relations with them. It seems paradoxical to think that the excess of illumination, emitted by the sun, bewilders our sight creating blind fields in our perception. Light is, at the same time, a source of clarity and the reason for concealment of a vision field.[...]

Everywhere we go, it seems that advertisements are progressively invading our public and private spaces. We are constantly being bombarded with messages trying to persuade us to consume a certain product or brand. Billboards hovering over crowded highways are a perfect example of this effort in mass consumption.[...]