2012.05.03
2012.06.15
Opening
CarrerasMugica is pleased to present the exhibition entitled PILGRIMAGES FOR A NEW ECONOMY by Los Angeles based artist Erlea Maneros.
→ Erlea Maneros ZabalaOriginally trained as a painter, Maneros Zabala has developed a conceptual art practice that analyses and reconstructs how images are composed, while addressing the contemporary cultural implications of the various forms and media with which she engages. Her work focuses on abstraction, but often through the use of figurative material. In her work, the artist involves appropriation, reproduction and mass production. Immersed in her research, she is a critic of the conventional values of art, particularly romantic notions of beauty, the sublime and art as a spiritual experience.
In his second solo exhibition at CarrerasMugica, he presents a project that stems from his research into the Orientalist Photography Collection of Ken and Jenny Jacobson, a pair of chemists living in England who assembled around 4500 photographs taken in the Middle East and North Africa between 1843 and 1920 shortly after the birth of the medium, and which he came to through previous work dealing with the Orientalism inherent in contemporary Western press photography. The images on display in the gallery, self-portraits in Arab dress by some of the authors of the photographs in this collection, like their contemporary counterparts, are presented to the public as if they were documentary in nature, when in fact the 'orientality' is merely an archetype. This is particularly significant in that the medium of photography, which had only recently appeared at the time, supposedly faithfully reproduces what it depicts, as opposed to more subjective media such as painting or drawing.
In the process MZ noted that several of the photo albums used marbled paper on the flyleaves and researched the history of this technique to discover that, like the representations that Europeans had taken with them with the use of their cameras, two centuries earlier they had done the same with paper marbling. The account in the foreword to the 3rd edition (1853) of C.W. Woolnough's The Art of Marbling is included in the book The Art of Marbling. Woolnough's The Art of Marbling is included in the exhibition as a laser print affixed to the gallery wall and explains the history of the European appropriation of marbling techniques as an allegory of the division of labour and the alienation of capitalist production that replaces artisanal processes.
Originally trained as a painter, Maneros Zabala has developed a conceptual art practice that analyses and reconstructs how images are composed, while addressing the contemporary cultural implications of the various forms and media with which she engages. Her work focuses on abstraction, but often through the use of figurative material. In her work, the artist involves appropriation, reproduction and mass production. Immersed in her research, she is a critic of the conventional values of art, particularly romantic notions of beauty, the sublime and art as a spiritual experience.
In his second solo exhibition at CarrerasMugica, he presents a project that stems from his research into the Orientalist Photography Collection of Ken and Jenny Jacobson, a pair of chemists living in England who assembled around 4500 photographs taken in the Middle East and North Africa between 1843 and 1920 shortly after the birth of the medium, and which he came to through previous work dealing with the Orientalism inherent in contemporary Western press photography. The images on display in the gallery, self-portraits in Arab dress by some of the authors of the photographs in this collection, like their contemporary counterparts, are presented to the public as if they were documentary in nature, when in fact the 'orientality' is merely an archetype. This is particularly significant in that the medium of photography, which had only recently appeared at the time, supposedly faithfully reproduces what it depicts, as opposed to more subjective media such as painting or drawing.
In the process MZ noted that several of the photo albums used marbled paper on the flyleaves and researched the history of this technique to discover that, like the representations that Europeans had taken with them with the use of their cameras, two centuries earlier they had done the same with paper marbling. The account in the foreword to the 3rd edition (1853) of C.W. Woolnough's The Art of Marbling is included in the book The Art of Marbling. Woolnough's The Art of Marbling is included in the exhibition as a laser print affixed to the gallery wall and explains the history of the European appropriation of marbling techniques as an allegory of the division of labour and the alienation of capitalist production that replaces artisanal processes.
