New Territories: Laboratories for Design, Craft and Art in Latin America

Ceramics- exhibition review (New Territories exhibit)

Exhibition critique:

New Territories: Laboratories for Design, Craft and Art in Latin America

If a viewer were to initially wander into the exhibition New Territories: Laboratories for Design, Craft and Art in Latin America, he or she might initially believe that the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) was showcasing a catalogue of traditional works from Latin America. However, upon closer examination, New Territories is actually a series of modern pieces by contemporary artists from the region who make use of techniques such as appropriation and pastiche of traditional designs. These works are reconfigurations of traditional images, hence the expression of 'new territories' in their output.

For example, Les Crayons Noirs (in collaboration with Felipe (Flip) Yung, Herbert Baglione, Sesper, and Thais Beltrame) makes use of traditional images and ways of rendering the human body common to many Latin American traditional works and transposes it into three-dimensional graffiti-like structures and onto porcelain. Bombe has an artisanal look and is created with spray paint (the French term for making graffiti with a spray can is to 'bomb') and porcelain. Images of traditional Brazilian design are fused with traditional 'high' art surfaces as well as onto nontraditional structures in the form of graffiti. These works are not the product of a single artistic intelligence but a collective. Thus, like traditional art, the works are presented as the collective work of a common 'people,' challenging traditional Western concepts of what 'high' art must be (individualistic and solitary) as well as what traditional materials should compose art. The work gives dignity to street art even while it has a conscious, intelligent design, as is characteristic of traditional 'high' art. It can thus be classified as conceptual in its fundamental nature even while it cultivates artless spontaneity in its appearance.

DFC, the product of a design collaborative arranged by Tony Moxham & Mauricio Paniagua is an equally arresting series of wall hangings that initially appear to be traditional Mexican handicrafts but instead use photographs and other modern representations to create a fusion of past and present. Many of the plates and ceramics have a deliberately 'kitschy' motif, even while they honor Mexican history. Not a work of a single artist, the coverings are all handmade and the result of the compilers' travels across Mexico. In one of the components of the exhibit, there are a series of traditional porcelain plates with red designs with modern images of faces -- frowning, smiling, and making silly faces -- of real human beings from photographs in their centers. Once again, traditional design (ceramic pottery) is merged with the modern (photography).