Juan Uribe
Uribe's work spans text, drawing, collage, painting, and sculpture, providing a Latin American perspective on the dynamics of dominance and power created by the historical teaching of Western art.
Assuming the received narratives but refusing to accept them, Uribe represents them in a way that intersects humor, irony and irreverence in the face of the dominance and privileges associated with Western canonical works, as well as the cult that is rendered to its artists. By appropriating and imitating other artists, he reveals affection for their work, while at the same time making a mockery of the conventions of contemporary gallery culture and public expectations.
David Guarnizo
My work starts from the relationship between the territory and three convergent concepts: Border, limit and line.
The image of a landscape immortalized on a banknote is an index of controlled and domesticated nature; of a perennial paradise resistant to the passage of time through the persistence, effort and action of man.
Exchange value suggests the question about the natural territories that are represented by landscape drawings on the new denomination Colombian banknotes. The illustrations on these banknotes expose these landscapes as if they were inexhaustible gardens, which in reality are vulnerable to the effect of the current environmental crisis, and to the particular political and economic interests that weigh on them.
Vanessa Nieto
"I dissected the mattress to its last corner in search of the origin of my nightmares".
Covering interests around the body, her work has been expressed in different languages, including installation, drawing and graphics. However, there is a primary interest in the materiality of the engraving processes: the act of generating an imprint, its relationship with violence and resonance with the body. Similarly, it explores dichotomies such as: fragility and strength; lightness and heaviness; healing and corrosion; latent and express; tension and bloating.
Topographies of the Obsolete is a project that constitutes a series of sculptural objects made with handmade paper, using cotton fiber, from abandoned mattresses, which have been collected while traveling in the city. The mattresses in this work are made of mattresses as well: converted into pulp, into a sheet of paper, to later be printed in lithography on Aluminum, filled, sewn and stained with oxide from the same object. They operate as an evocation of memory, but also, their object and material presence became more conscious since the increase in abandoned mattresses in the city with the arrival of the current pandemic. It is interesting to evoke what the body emanates and is permeated by the dermis of the mattress, each one with its history and spelling. Each mattress that is recreated is a memory test, hoping to find my grandmother's hand in those abandoned bodies. Each mattress is autopsied, opened, disassembled, cooked, pulped, to create new topographies and vestiges of bodies.
Carolina Borrero
Be Digging The structural study of the layers of the skin, the earth and the cuticle of a plant reveals a correlation of functions, forms and defense mechanisms that define a body that, when in contact with another, creates a system of coexistence. From this premise, this project arises, a series of plastic processes that are born from restructuring plant matter recovered from the moor to make it a mark of the relationship we have built with this territory.
The act of excavating as a metaphor weaves a series of reflections about the crossing of the natural limits of bodies as an act of transformation. Digging is ultimately the action of removing something that is underground, stirring, attacking the layers of the ground to get what we are looking for. From the above, a series of inquiries arise about the extractive activities that are carried out in the country's moors and the way in which we relate to the natural resources that they provide us. These ecosystems are an example of the paradox we face as a society: They are large stores of water, but also a source of mineral resources, this means that to preserve water, it is necessary to dispense with mineral exploitation, on the contrary, to extracting minerals ensures the loss of water, but how do we conceive ourselves without minerals? Or without water?
Being Excavation translates the effects of mining on a “Bicolor Echevería”, a colombian flower, found broken on the trail while traveling through the Guacheneque paramo. The plant was taken to the workshop, seeded and cultivated. Once it recovered its vitality, all its energy resources were extracted —as happens with the moors—, the end result is the skin of this plant devoid of life, dry and empty.
Juan David Figueroa - Álvaro Rodríguez
The work of this couple of artists from Bogota concentrates a wide diversity of media and explorations. Mainly, this group has dedicated the last years of research the technique of photogrammetry and how it puts tension on traditional photography and digital media.
This project is made up of a set of data points in 3D space, acquired in this case through the photogrammetry process. It is a dialogue between the virtual and the physical world. This work consists of a series of later images that come "to life" from hundreds of photographs of the same subject. The act of repetition takes on a new meaning. The work of Figueroa and Rodríguez is an effort to broaden the photographic horizon and reconstruct, through the digital image, the most complex that the Colombian natural landscape offers.