polvo art studio at the stray show - may 7-9, 2004

artists: saul aguirre, carianacarianne, miguel cortez, dianna frid, edra soto

 


saul aguirre		 Manos, Manitas!

Saul began exploring the use of the hands as a form of communication in his art many months ago. He started working to share these images and the ideology behind them.
Hand signals – the sign language – represent a unique system of communication that effectively conveys the basic information needed to conduct between people. The signals are the favored form of communication, especially in the streets.
Hand signals have being used extensively throughout the world for ages. Although, some signals are similar to others, they may have different meanings and also in several ages the meaning has been changed, yet for now we have different cultures that gather around more often and it may translate in to the society’s new meaning. Hand signals meet the need to speed up communication in the many trades, roads, wars, common insults and basic needs of society.
Some are unique to particular places. But take note, some signals may mean one thing in a certain area, while a similar signal may mean something entirely different in another place. Many images have an inquire of dignity, hate or just love depending on the viewer knowledge, these signals can be understood globally.

Saul Aguirre born in Mexico City. Since 1986 live in Chicago, Studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. His work forms part of several public and private collections throughout Chicago, Washington DC, Italy Mexico and Peru.

carianacarianne		 'Consciousness for us, is knowing every hair on our body, yet not knowing they are all living on the same body.'

One recent Friday afternoon, we were sitting with a friend when we began talking about Chimeras. Human Chimeras to be exact. We said, 'Sophisticated DNA testing is turning up more and more cases of chimeras - people with two sets of DNA.' Quite perplexed, my friend replied that what we said was impossible, that genes were unique and no two sets of DNA were alike, and that we must have been misinformed. But according to the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Immunogenetics, and the American Journal of Human Genetics, it is possible. The response by our friend was genuine, yet it was the statement born of misinformation.

What we find absolutely amazing about Chimeras is that the possibility of being two has always been present. It was only perceived as an impossibility because the possibility was undiscovered. Actually, to be 'undiscovered' can be qualified as 'that which is not part of consciousness.' Therefore. bringing the unknown into a conscious form has come to deeply interest us both.

The conversation with our friend reminded us that there is so much that is undiscovered about the human experience, about twoness, or even about the belief in possibility. That conversation has reminded us again, why we continue to become Deleuze and Guattari's 'body without organs' as we write Helen Cixous' 'imund' book, or forbidden book, which she describes as 'that (which) makes us experience a kind of dying, that drops the self, the speculative self, the speculating clever "I".'

Born in the USA in 1971, CarianaCarianne is a multidisciplinary collaborative artist interested in reinventing the individual into a collaborative team. Believing her true self to be the embodiment of both Cariana and Carianne, they equally conceive, participate in, and realize all projects together. After Cariana received a master of fine arts degree in sculpture from University of North Carolina in 2001, they moved to Chicago to enable Carianne to complete her master of fine arts degree in fiber and material studies from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003. Their installations, objects and videos have been exhibited internationally with their video, What Is It That We Want- The Fugue, screening in Chicago, San Francisco, Croatia, and Hungry in 2002. Their more recent film, The Two of Me and Our Etiology, premiered at the European Media Arts Festival in Osnabruck, Germany in 2003 and has continued to screen in Canada at Light Plays Tricks Short Film Festival in Ontario and in Texas at the Dallas Video Festival at the Dallas Museum of Art. Their web and digital works have been exhibited at Prenelle Gallery in London, the Istanbul Museum of Art Biennial in Turkey, as well as in various venues in Chicago including the Betty Rymer Gallery, G2, Butcher Shop, and the 2003 Stray Show. Their selected solo-collaborative exhibitions include Polvo Art Studio (Chicago), Croxhapox Gallery (Belgium), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, June 2004) and the Chicago Cultural Center (Chicago, October 2004). They have lectured on their collaborative work at University of North Carolina, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Chicago, and Ghent Academy of Fine Arts in Belgium. Currently, they are living and working in Chicago.

miguel cortez		 empathy
: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also : the capacity for this

Lately I have been fascinated by the concept of empathy- constantly imagining how it would feel to experience other people's experiences and feelings during various minute everyday situations, ie., people at restaurants or on the street, what is going through their heads as they are crossing the street or having coffee and reading a newspaper. I look at old photographs and try to imagine what these people were going through, what they may have been thinking at the second this photograph was taken, knowing that what I am looking at could be the only record of their existence.

So I take these feelings/emotions and try to create art in such a way that it not only is an abstract series of works but it would also be a record of my meditative experiences.

Miguel Cortez is an artist living in Chicago and born in Guanajuato, Mexico in 1970. He has studied filmaking at Columbia College and fine arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Miguel has exhibited his work for more than a decade in Chicago, Mexico, and Spain. Recent exhibitions include shows in Barcelona at Casa Elizalde, Centre Civic de Barceloneta and Centro Cultural Can Fabra in Sant Andreu.

dianna frid		 Dianna Frid is interested in notions of cartography, architecture, and geography that deal with the imaginable, the intuitive and the scientific. In her work, materials such as cloth, tin foil, paper, thread, and adhesives are re-configured to make objects, displays, books and images which embody these notions. The combination of methods and the variety of the elements with which Frid works are vehicles for questions concerning the relationships of the generic, the personal, the factual and the mysterious. In commenting on historical and contemporary examples of mapping, building and landscaping-and by using materials and display processes that are, to an extent, transformable, ephemeral and regenerative-Frid loosely alludes to the inconsistencies inherent in the systems and structures that set out to classify and measure "the world". It is with suggested narratives that Frid acknowledges human contradictions, and desires.

Dianna Frid was born in Mexico City and since 1983 has lived in Canada and the U.S. As an undergraduate, she studied Anthropology at Hampshire College (Amherst, MA) before completing her BFA at the Art Institute of Chicago. Dianna Frid has exhibited her work in Mexico, Canada, the U.S., Europe and Brazil. She was a Trustees Merit Scholar in the Fiber and Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she completed her MFA (2003). Dianna Frid is Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago's Midway Studios where she is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow. She recently showed her collaborative project, "The Field," at Gallery 400 as part of the At the Edge series.

edra soto		 Ornamentos 2004 (A Year in Review)

Ornamentos 2004 (Ornaments 2004) is a detailed documentation of popular culture inspired by Mexican folkloric art (Saints Without Body). Derived from the engraved Saints Without Body, Ornamentos are presented on sheets of metal in a reposé style and presented in a small scale. The Saints and the Ornamentos have in common their fragile, mundane and somewhat kitsch physicality with unexpectedly insightful content. The Saints are custom made for a person that has passed away to commemorate his or her death. What I represent in the Ornamentos are records of daily news, not limited to a portrait representation, but to everything that I decide to give meaning to through this ritual of selective inclusion of historical data.

The Ornamentos dimensions are a maximum of 5"x 5" and a minimum of 1 1/2" x 1 1/2". The size of the images selected is not altered. The result is a transfer: a direct tracing from the picture selected from the newspaper. Then this image is given the title of the headline under which it was found. The titles are presented in a compendium similar to a statistics book. Also, the images are categorized through color. A color code legend will be placed towards the beginning of what will become an immense grid. The color code legend: Gold covers entertainment news, silver covers world news, copper covers local news.

The images represented as Ornamentos are taken from a selected newspaper. The gathering of information is gradual and accumulative (day by day), taken from a single source and is relevant to the place that I am living in at the moment. For example: this project started on January 2nd in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The Newspaper selected in Puerto Rico is called El Nuevo Dia. My reason for choosing this particular newspaper is that this is the most popular newspaper in Puerto Rico and the only one my parents subscribe to. Currently, I'm using the Chicago Sun Times.

Through this manner of gathering information I become (symbolically) what I call a narrow-minded historian. History being written in first person and accepted by educational institutions is a universal theme worth exploring, if not realistically, at least in a symbolic way.

This project will document my vision of the year in news, 2004.

Edra Soto was born in Puerto Rico. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a Masters degree in 2000 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture the same year. She is currently working as a high school art teacher for Chicago Public Schools.


edra soto and saul aguirre