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Douz & Mille presents three Latinas whose photography, video, and sculptural installation incorporate space as a central component. Space, which may take the form of architectural dimensions, natural environment, personal habitat, or the parameters of one's interior world. Magdalena Fernandez and Angela Bonadies, both of Venezuela, and Ada Bobonis, of Puerto Rico, also share a preoccupation with the histories of their respective countries and peoples, informing the content of their diverse work.
The birth of modernism was protracted in both Venezuela and Puerto Rico. Unlike in Latin American neighbors Cuba, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, the avant-garde did not emerge until the mid-twentieth century. In Venezuela, the post-World War II oil industry boom created a push toward modernization. In Puerto Rico, political change instigated industrialization and cultural self-definition. Government funding for the arts became available in both countries, leading to a series of important public commissions in Caracas of op art murals and kinetic sculptures by such artists as Jesus Rafael Soto, Alejandro Otero and Carlos Cruz-Diez.
Magdalena Fernandez's installations and videos often reference this Venezuelan history of geometric and kinetic abstraction. Combining industrial materials such as aluminum, rubber and optical fiber with natural elements of light, water and earth in her installations, Fernandez creates phenomenological environments. Like Gego, she fuses the organic with abstract sculptural form. In the case of the video Ara Ararauna (1pm006), the squawk of the eponymous tropical parrot provides the soundtrack for the colorful, comic digital animation inspired by Piet Mondrian. The video 3pm006, one of the pintura movil or moving painting series, harkens back to the earliest roots of constructivist abstraction: Kasimir Malevich's painting Suprematist Composition: White on White.
Angela Bonadies explores a more personal sense of history and space. Her series of portraits of ordinary people in their living spaces are reminiscent of early twentieth century German photographer August Sander’s typology of people of all professions, classes and political parties. The impassive expressions of Bonadies' sitters are psychologically mysterious. They are defined by their clothing, belongings and especially their surroundings. Her recent series are about accumulations of objects; things collected or archived. The Latin horror vacui is evident in the interiors filled to the brim with decades of souvenirs, devotional objects, and portraits of former selves. The tactile accumulations of a lifetime are framed by Bonadies to provide narrative insights into each domestic sphere.
Consisting of six light box-illuminated photographs, the architectural element of a staircase and a mass of colored electrical cords, Ada Bobonis's installation Ventanas (Windows) operates on several levels of meaning. Bobonis constructs a dialogue about architectural authenticity and Puerto Rican history, as well as an aesthetic interplay between two and three-dimensional space.
Taken during the renovation of La Concha Hotel in San Juan, these photographs reference the beginning of modernism in Puerto Rico. Designed by Miguel Toro and Osvaldo Ferrer during the optimistic 1950s era of modernization under Governor Luís Munoz Marín, the hotel was once a proud example of progress. Bobonis focuses on the grid of stained glass windows, with their interplay between interior and exterior space. The landscape glimpsed through the windows ranges from beachfront to urban congestion. Perhaps commenting on a perceived lack of progress on the island, as the faux-Spanish Revival style of the hotel renovation marks the sad neglect of Puerto Rico's Tropical Modernist heritage.
On an aesthetic level, Bobonis's installation refers to two forms of painterly space: the Renaissance linear perspective where a painting is treated as an illusionistic window on the world and modern abstraction where the surface becomes flat. The light boxes combine the illusion of windows with the two-dimensional surfaces of the photographs. Infused with beautiful color, these photo boxes are both painterly and sculptural. They clearly belong to Bobonis’s minimalist form of architecturally influenced sculpture, but also point to a new direction of three-dimensional painting.
Utilizing the artistic languages of geometric abstraction, social documentary and architecture, Fernández, Bonadies and Bobonis comment on the worlds they see. Each artist carves out a space within the historical, the national or the domestic realm, finding something to resound within the viewer.
Laura Roulet
Independent curator
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