monica herrera
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Opening Friday July 9 from 6-10pm
runs from July 9 – July 31, 2004
In continuing with Polvo’s history of showcasing cutting edge contemporary art(a couple of past artists already have had shows at the MCA), we present two emerging artists from Mexico City: Amanda Gutiérrez and Mónica Herrera as well as local artist Melanie Adcock for our July show.
According to Amanda and Monica’s statement for this show: “The
city, in abstract, is crossed by numerous interior cities; by spaces
that are created through the experiences of the subjects who inhabit
and transform it into a function of their culture and notion of life.
From everyday life, there arise instantaneous complicities, often microscopic,
that provoke transitory relations with the surrounding environment. The
invisible barriers within the many territories that compose a city are
perceived differently according to: economic status, cultural and ethnic
differences, architecture style, smells, sounds, rhythms, characters,
etc.”
Amanda Gutiérrez takes the testimony of immigrants living in Chicago
as raw material to try to give a view of their situation as subjects of the
place they inhabit. She wants to relate these experiences to the physical qualities
of the gallery—altitude, longitude and magnitude levels, to time and
space. Likewise, Mónica Herrera proposes an installation about the invisible
frontiers of a city. She uses fragments of things to explore the changes from
one place to another. Mónica relates her sensitive experience with the
plurality of the communities that are manifested through the different local
landscapes found in her work.
Amanda Gutiérrez, born in Mexico City in 1978, studied philosophy at UAM (Metropolitan University) and received a BA degree in stage design from the National School of Dramatic Arts. She is a multi media artist, combining installation, sound, stage design, digital media and performance. In 2000, she participated in the “10th International Festival of Performance”, which took place in Scientific Museum “Universum”. There Amanda presented a work called Relativo en 4, in which she took Einstein’s Theory of Relativity as a metaphor of the temporal measure of objects in the time and space they inhabit.
One of her independent sound performance projects was in 2002 in the Mexico-Japan Performance Festival with a piece called Pi. Radio was the pressure point between rhythm and execution in this performance. It was from this experience that she came to understand the melodic basis that radio samples processed with a variety of computer programs, may provide. By becoming acquainted with the use of video, audio and lightning software and hardware Amanda was able to get in touch with the acoustic characteristics of space. This experience led her to do more complex installations which involved elements of programming to control audio, for instance, En Media, at the Fifth International Sound Art Festival (2002), and That is the Question at the Version03 Festival in Chicago, Illinois. She was granted two artistic residences thanks to experimentation with web radio. The first one was for the project Solaris at the CMM (Mexico City Multimedia Centre). There, she focused on the analysis of physical phenomena of the Sun and Jupiter. Secondly, Amanda was invited to ZKM, Germany, to develop a project called Radial, an itinerant radio station that streams SW frequencies.
Monica Herrera was born in Birmingham, England, in 1974, but has lived in Mexico City all of her life. She moved to Chicago in September of 2003. She studied a B.A. in Arts at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado “La Esmeralda”. She presented her first individual exhibition in Mexico City in 2000. Her work “Masas” was selected for the “Arte Joven 2002” itinerary exhibition throughout Mexico. She has participated in several collective exhibitions, among which the most recent are “Rotación XX”, at the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Artes (UNAM-Roma) in November 2002, where she presented her work “Impaciencia”; and the “Exposición de la Fraternidad Universal para la defensa y promoción de M. Bondarchuk”, presented in the gallery Art & Idea in 2003, where she presented her installation “Rastro”.
12" x 12" mini-installation projects
this month's artist: Melanie Adcock
Melanie A. Adcock serves as an enthusiastic contributing member of ARC Gallery. Having spent 4 years of her life living in women’s residences, 2 years at Chicago’s Three Arts Club, and 2 years at Washington D.C.’s Thompson Markward Hall, respectively, she has a strong commitment toward supporting women run art institutions. She teaches at the International Academy of Design and Technology and displays her work in alternative Chicago Arts venues and nationally. She received her B.F.A. in Painting at the Kansas City Art Institute and her M. A. in Sculpture and Weaving from Eastern Illinois University.
Melanie
originally grew up on a farm in downstate Illinois outside of
a town of only 500
people
where her family has worked in agriculture
business for over 100 years. Her childhood was spent in a vast expanse
of corn and soybean fields. This isolation crystallized what would later
become a wildly active imagination perfectly suited to tackling the forefront
of contemporary art. Though Chicago is now her home she maintains the
old fashion work ethic and values she grew up with and applies it to
her art making. Her cutting edge interior manipulations, wearable structures,
and wall constructions are highly sought after as a rich cultural addition
to Chicago’s alternative art scene. She has her own studio in East
Pilsen, the Chicago Art District, and it is turning into its own installation
of sorts.
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installation 2004
Melanie Adcock
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wall installation, mixed media, 2004
Melanie Adcock
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