As a proud participant of Chihuahua, México’s La Ruta1 and La Ruta 1.1 Contemporary Art & Culture Festival, my latest installation Ultraterrestrial, on exhibit at La Estación Arte Contemporáneo is a sensorial, fusion of fragments commingled from personal memories and time spent in several regions of the Chihuahuan Desert.
This multi-layered installation begins with abstracted crystalline forms painted on the gallery walls, inspired by Chihuahua’s Minas de Naica and the unexpected desert landscaping that could be found inside my childhood home, as well as alien planets from science fiction which looked very similar to the desert caves that I explored growing up.
Laser cut arabesque mirrors are superimposed over the crystalline designs to welcome the viewers gaze and invite them to notice their own pleasure of looking and to further physically explore the installation as a whole artwork and experience, containing multiple individual stations and pockets of temporarily reflected moments. Your own reflection is the art. The reflected activity of the city is the art.
Within this shifting installation are industrial shop lamps that beam light onto the mirrors casting reflected forms onto the ceilings and floor across the space. As the sun sets through the windows outside the gallery the reflected forms of light become more apparent within the space as tiny multiple mirages, some of which disappear as you attempt to move closer to them.
The mirrors attached to the outside of the gallery also cast reflections onto the surrounding streets that gradually seep into and creep up the surrounding buildings away into the sky with the setting sun to return, renewed the following day.
Back in the gallery an additional series of laser cut designs displaying mutated combination of images such as Mexican actor Tin Tan, antelope, swings, tractors and BMX riders are hung in a grid formation, floating off the walls, allowing the multilayered cut outs to project ephemeral shadow drawings on the wall in an attempt to illustrate the presence of memory. These works serve as another opportunity for viewers to move their bodies around the works to discover how their visual experience may change depending on their physical position.
The final station in this installation is a mirrored laser cut, text design with the phrase The Artist Has a Higher Threshold for Chaos/ El Artista Tiene El Umbral Mas Alto Para Caos. The words are intermixed and reversed as the languages simultaneously devour one another and presently co-exist. The reflection of the mirror reflects the entire installation. The reversed text may give the viewer the feeling of being on the inside of the mirror.