OAS General Secretariat Building -- Terrace Level Gallery -- Exhibit: "Love Me, Quiéreme, Buy Me" (Carolina Mayorga):
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Description of Pictures: Love Me, Quiéreme, Buy Me, by Carolina Mayorga:
On view March 12-April 30, 2010
Washington, DC: The Art Museum of the Americas announces the opening of Love Me, Quiéreme, Buy Me, an installation of photographic images and video art that comment on women’s behavior in relation to popular culture and social norms, the search for personal acceptance, and on habitual consumption as a means of searching for personal value. This exhibit is a part of the National Women’s History Project’s 2010 "Writing Women Back into History" program.
Love Me, Quiéreme, Buy Me is a site-specific project where the artist frames her "photo sculptures" installation with an excerpt from the popular song Callejera (Streetwalker), first recorded by Carlos Gardel in 1929. The song’s lyrics refer to their subject as a "flamboyant piece of furniture…that shines", warning that "when you advance in age and lack in appeal, you will have a dead heart." With this stark reminder of the inevitable disintegration of the human body as a contextual groundwork, Mayorga presents a series of images that range from hyper-detailed close-ups of lipstick-colored lips and female subjects with closed eyes that resonate in their inter-subjective qualities, to outdoor settings of subjects going about their day to day lives.
The exhibit offers a perspective on women’s behavior that is framed in everyday life and global consumerism. The Love Me in DC series includes the image of a woman’s legs in boots as she sits at a bus stop. Next to her are advertisements for a popular juice beverage and a chain restaurant.
In the Dance with Me video, a woman’s shoes and ankles are visible as she moves with a spirited vigor. When a male’s dress shoes and black pants enter the frame to dance with her, her movements become stilted, but they soon walk out of frame together. In "Muted," the artist speaks through red lips, until duct-taping her mouth shut. Once the tape is removed with lipstick stuck to it, she speaks again.
Also from the series Love me in DC, a subject poses triumphantly with a statue of Simon Bolivar, the 19th century political leader who is credited with playing a key role in the independence from the Spanish monarchy of several Latin-American countries. Only her tall pink boots and ankles are in the frame. The image suggests a gender-specific twist on the notion of independence and liberation.
Carolina Mayorga was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and has held one-person shows in Colombia, Mexico, at the University of Kansas in and the Washington, DC area. She has also participated in group exhibitions in Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Sweden and numerous cities of the United States. Her work frequently shifts between genres, enveloping its messages in video, sculpture, drawings, mixed-media installations, and performances. Rather then rest comfortably in one particular set of aesthetics, Mayorga allows for her works’ themes to determine the form in which they are conveyed.
Her work comments on migration, identity, war, and gender roles in frank satires that can be chilling (in the case of her snow sculpture in Sweden that spelled out "by the time this sculpture melts 45,000 children will die in war" until is dissipated into water) just as well as humorous (such as her "newspaper soup" performances, in which the artist hosts her own cooking show, instructing audiences in the cuisine of the impoverished).
The OAS Terrace Level Gallery is located at 1889 F Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20006 and it is open to the public Mondays-Fridays from 10 am until 5 pm. The gallery is closed on Federal holidays.
The National Women’s History Project was founded in 1980. One of its goals is to recognize the achievements of women in varying disciplines and vocations. To learn more about the NWHP, visit the website www.nwhp.org
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LOVEME_100423_02.JPG: Raquel Forner of Argentina:
For many months the dean of Argentine women artists, Raquel Forner has been at work on a mural for the entrance hall of the new Secretariat Building of the Organization of American States in Washington DC, toiling away in the house in a picturesque quarter of Buenos Aires that for forty years has served her as both residence and studio.
Finished at last, the painting now joins murals by the Brazilian Manabu Mabe and the Peruvian Fernando Szyszlo and a tapestry by the Mexican Leonardo Nierman to transform the lobby's cavernous reaches into a dazzling vision of the creative talent so abundantly active in Latin America today. ...
Typical of her visionary nature is the mural she has painted for Washington, characteristically entitled "Origin of a New Dimension." Its strongly contrasting colors, fluid lines, and amoebic shapes suggest the evolution of form from the amorphous, of structure from chaos. Arms stretch out, not in threat or in grasping acquisitiveness, but in gestures of friendship, prefiguring a harmonious world order to come. ...
"Origin of a New Dimension" is symbolic both of Forner's evolution and of the spirit which informs it. The grays of the lateral figures aspire toward the bright colors of the central composition; humanity in bondage is dazzled by a vision of freer, more abundant life to come -- a universe of music and joy. The generous gift of the artist and the Government and people of Argentina to the Organization of American States is more than a work of art: it bears a message of peace, fraternity, and happiness for all.
LOVEME_100423_37.JPG: Love Me, Quiéreme, Buy Me
by Carolina Mayorga
Washington, DC: The Art Museum of the Americas announces the opening of Love Me, Quiéreme, Buy Me, an installation of photographic images and video art that comment on women's behavior in relation to popular culture and social norms, the search for personal acceptance, and on habitual consumption as a means of searching for personal value. This exhibit is a part of the National Women's History Project's 2010 "Writing Women Back into History" program.
Love Me, Quiéreme, Buy Me is a site-specific project where the artist frames her "photo sculptures" installation with an excerpt from the popular song Callejera (Streetwalker), first recorded by Carlos Gardel in 1929. The song's lyrics refer to their subject as a "flamboyant piece of furniture…that shines", warning that "when you advance in age and lack in appeal, you will have a dead heart." With this stark reminder of the inevitable disintegration of the human body as a contextual groundwork, Mayorga presents a series of images that range from hyper-detailed close-ups of lipstick-colored lips and female subjects with closed eyes that resonate in their inter-subjective qualities, to outdoor settings of subjects going about their day to day lives.
The exhibit offers a perspective on women's behavior that is framed in everyday life and global consumerism. The Love Me in DC series includes the image of a woman's legs in boots as she sits at a bus stop. Next to her are advertisements for a popular juice beverage and a chain restaurant.
In the Dance with Me video, a woman's shoes and ankles are visible as she moves with a spirited vigor. When a male's dress shoes and black pants enter the frame to dance with her, her movements become stilted, but they soon walk out of frame together. In "Muted," the artist speaks through red lips, until duct-taping her mouth shut. Once the tape is removed with lipstick stuck to it, she speaks again.
Also from the series Love me in DC, a subject poses triumphantly with a statue of Simon Bolivar, the 19th century political leader who is credited with playing a key role in the independence from the Spanish monarchy of several Latin-American countries. Only her tall pink boots and ankles are in the frame. The image suggests a gender-specific twist on the notion of independence and liberation.
Carolina Mayorga was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and has held one-person shows in Colombia, Mexico, at the University of Kansas in and the Washington, DC area. She has also participated in group exhibitions in Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Sweden and numerous cities of the United States. Her work frequently shifts between genres, enveloping its messages in video, sculpture, drawings, mixed-media installations, and performances. Rather then rest comfortably in one particular set of aesthetics, Mayorga allows for her works' themes to determine the form in which they are conveyed.
Her work comments on migration, identity, war, and gender roles in frank satires that can be chilling (in the case of her snow sculpture in Sweden that spelled out "by the time this sculpture melts 45,000 children will die in war" until is dissipated into water) just as well as humorous (such as her "newspaper soup" performances, in which the artist hosts her own cooking show, instructing audiences in the cuisine of the impoverished).
The OAS Terrace Level Gallery is located at 1889 F Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20006 and it is open to the public Mondays-Fridays from 10 am until 5 pm. The gallery is closed on Federal holidays.
The National Women's History Project was founded in 1980. One of its goals is to recognize the achievements of women in varying disciplines and vocations. To learn more about the NWHP, visit the website www.nwhp.org
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