San Isidro’s Still, curated by Daniel Garza-Usabiaga and Paulina Ascensio, attempts to link, through a particular setting, the sphere of art with the world of entheogens. San Isidro, in this way, refers to the common name given to hallucinogenic mushrooms in Mexico. Connections between such states of intoxication and art as instigators of profane insight, new perceptions, ritual encounter, and ludic explorations are addressed, historically, through different creative processes. The exhibition continues a long tradition of such explorations through art of the twentieth century - individuals including Antonin Artaud, Henri Michaux, and Rudolf Steiner; just to mention a few. The artworks in this exhibition deal with notions related to the cosmos, archaic and symbolic forms, the spirituality of the natural world, the architecture of geology and minerals, sacred geometry, and the relation between the microcosm and macrocosm. The materiality and solutions of the artists' works adjusts and reinforces the exhibition’s perspective. San Isidro’s Still gathers works from artists of different generations – from Fernando González Gortázar to Cristina Tufiño; from different geographies - Anouk Kruithof (Netherlands) to José Ignacio Solózano (Guadalajara, Mexico); and explores their relationships between one-another and the broader universe.

ABOUT THE CURATORS:

Daniel Garza Usabiaga (b. Mexico City, Mexico, 1975) holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Theory from the University of Essex (UK) and a Postdoctoral position at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM (México City). He was curator of the Museum of Modern Art and Chief Curator of the Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico City. He is the author of Mathias Goeritz and Emotional Architecture. A Critical Review 1952-1968 (Vanilla Planifolia, 2012). Currently is an independent curator and academic.

Paulina Ascencio (b. Guadalajara, Mexico, 1988) is an independent curator and researcher based in Mexico. She graduated from Philosophy and Social Sciences. She is an alumni of the Curatorial Intensive program of Independent Curators International (ICI) in New Orleans.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:

ANOUK KRUITHOF
b.Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1981
Lives and works in Mexico City

Anouk Kruithof is a Dutch artist, working in Mexico City. Her multilayered, interdisciplinary approach encompasses photography, sculpture, installation, artist-books, text, performance, video, animation, websites and interventions in the public domain. Kruithof’s work is an investigation into the online representation of urgent societal themes. Over the past few years she collected circulating images related to issues like privacy, government surveillance, pollution and climate change. Kruithof subjects these to critical scrutiny by extracting existing imagery from the digital sphere, and translating the photographs into her own idiosyncratic three-dimensional visual idiom. She has exhibited internationally at institutions such as MoMA, New York; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; and Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow. Her work is in the collections of Fotomuseum Winterthur, Aperture Foundation, FOAM and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

CLIVE MURPHY
b. Ireland, 1971
Lives and works in New York

Based in New York, Irish artist Clive Murphy’s practice draws from the peripheries of visual culture. Mining diverse sources he utilizes the formal properties of the commonplace to produce works that create a junction of societal and cultural phenomenon. He appropriates and reconfigures familiar signifiers in order to explore their wider cultural resonance, uncovering new ground for the proliferation of diverse meanings. Murphy’s work concerns itself with both site and surface - not only the position of the individual within an increasingly ‘mass’ oriented environment but also the contours, the landscapes through which this environing is revealed. Exploring themes of hierarchy, inter-relationality and meaning formation, he infiltrates sites of visual signification with a combination of pathos and incongruity, reconstituting ideological, cultural and rhetorical systems in an effort to situate a new sense of human space.

CRISTINA TUFIÑO
b. Capetillo, Puerto Rico
Lives and works in Philadelphia

Inspired by consumer goods, industrial debris and autobiographical narratives and objects, Cristina Tufiño addresses her practice as an archaeologist hoarder rummaging through a broad cultural system of references, with a particular nod to artifacts and museological aesthetics. Her multimedia works arise from a process of assembling, associating and translating images and ideas inspired by seemingly oppositional languages and spaces. Tufiño’s photographic compositions, prints, videos, installations and sculptures, give a new meaning to post-studio practices and the use of social debris in our time.


EAMON ORE-GIRON
b.Tucson, Arizona, USA 1973
Lives and works in New York and Los Angeles

Eamon Ore-Giron received a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute (1996) and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles (2006). He has had solo exhibitions at LAX ART, Los Angeles (2015); Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York City (2014); MUCA ROMA, Mexico City (2006); Queen’s Nails Annex, San Francisco (2005) and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia (2005). His work has been included in group shows at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; Prospect 3, New Orleans; the Perez Art Museum, Miami, and Deitch Projects, New York. Ore-Giron's work has been covered in The New York Times, Art Forum, ANP Quarterly, and SFAQ, among other publications. Eamon Ore-Giron is based in New York and Los Angeles.

FERNANDO GONZÁLEZ GORTÁZAR
b.Mexico City, Mexico, 1942
Lives and works in Mexico City

Fernando González Gortázar is a Mexican architect, sculptor and writer, considered to be one of the most influential Mexican architects of the 20th century. Among his most important works, we find The Great Gate (1969), the Fountain of Sister Water (1970), the entrance to González Gallo Park and The Tower of Cubes (both from 1972), the Plaza-Fountain (1973), the González Silva House (1980), the Elf’s Walkway (1991), the Maya People’s Museum (1993), the Public Safety Center (1993), the Los Altos University Center of the University of Guadalajara (1993, still unfinished), the Chiapas Museum of Science and Technology (2005), and the Emblem of San Pedro (Fátima and the Flags Monument, 2011), and The Three Hairs of the Devil (2014), all in various cities in Mexico, as well as the Fountain of Stairs (Madrid, 1987) and The Escorial Tree (El Escorial, 1995) in Spain, and the Disjointed Column (1989) at the Hakone Open-Air Museum, in Japan. In 2000, he held the Federico Mariscal Professorship of the Department of Architecture of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). In 2009, he hosted Cancioncitas (Little Songs), 26 radio programs on Mexican popular music in the twentieth century, for Radio UNAM, which were later rebroadcast by several stations in Mexico and Colombia.


ISA CARRILLO
b.Guadalajara, Mexico, 1982
Lives and works in Guadalajara

In her artistic output, Isa often uses elements that originate from pseudoscience and mystical concepts to show the dark side of everyday life. Exhibited individually and collectively in Diego Rivera Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City, Museum of Painters in Oaxaca, Zapopan Art Museum (MAZ), Museum of the City of Guadalajara, Forum for Art and Culture, Ex Convento del Carmen, Cultural Modern Art Center, Sala Juarez, TRAMA Center, Museum-Studio Clemente Orozco, among others. She was a fellow of the Young Artists Program 2009-2010 issued by the National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA), by the National Council for Culture and the Arts (CECA) 2013-2014 and recently won a grant of the Incentives Program to Creation, and Artistic Development (PECDA) 2015-2016 in Jalisco, Mexico.


JIPPIES ASQUEROSOS
Curated by Willy Kautz
Mexico City, Mexico

Jippies Asquerosos is a project by Willy Kautz. Its primary objective is diluting the boundaries between curatorial and artistic practices by extending the artwork production towards the exhibition as a medium. Formed in 2005 and based on the concept of the suprasensible, these expository deployments aim to put the phenomenology of the artwork and the imaginaries of the psychedelic culture and art history in opposition. Its projects are exercises of sensory immersion articulated through the tension between the mystic, reflexive and trans-experience against diverse critical frameworks extracted from political economy, aesthetics and ecology.


JOSÉ IGNACIO SOLÓRZANO (JIS)
b.Guadalajara, Mexico, 1963
Lives and works in Guadalajara

The career of José Ignacio Solórzano (JIS) is divided into three highlights: beginning as a cartoonist in the eighties; consolidation of the El Santos comic strip, co-authored with Trino in the nineties; and since the year 2000, his incursion into scenarios and dynamics of art. Over three decades, his cartoons and drawings have evolved, proceeding from witty dark humor to wider art forms. In recent years, JIS has revitalized his creative production, exploring formal possibilities of style, transforming exhaustive detail, barroco, into stylized forms with solid colors using digital intervention. Refined humor is the preface of a proposal frequently touched with poetry and philosophy. His most recent artistic production exposes the ups and downs of romantic love and the complex simplicity of his private life, revealing an introspective rumination about his relationship with himself. Elucidations about existence, the reasonable and unreasonable, sexuality and eroticism of objects, acknowledgement of the body’s limits as a maintenance tool for the world and the other, are the trademarks of his work. Just like a torn apart diary, JIS’ artworks are self-referential: they unveil complexities of the authorship and enchantments of everyday life in a playful, merry way of exploring different forms of philosophy.


KRISTIN REGER
b. Chicago, USA, 1984
Lives and works in Mexico City

Kristin Reger is a visual artist. Her background is in costume and textiles. Her work explores the relationships between sculpture and body. She has exhibited at institutions including ICA Boston, MCA Chicago, Carillo Gil (CdMx), Arte Alameda (CdMx), SAPS (CdMx), MUSAS (Hermosillo), MoSex (NY), Recess (NY), Textile Arts Center (Brooklyn); and at art fairs NADA (NY), MACO (CdMx), Salón Acme (CdMx). Kristin is a current Visual Art PhD Candidate at UNAM, from which she also holds an MFA. She also studied at SOMA Mexico.


MARIE STRAUSS
b. Berlin, Germany, 1981
Lives and works in Berlin and Mexico City

Marie Strauss lives and works between Berlin and Mexico City. She studied art at the Universität der Bildenden Künste Berlin (UdK). In 2011 she was awarded by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) for a one year postgraduate scholarship in cooperation with the Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM). Since this time she has studied and worked with the Japanese sculptor Kyioto Ota. Awards: 2018 Edith Maryon Foundation (Swiss) 2016/17 Matching Funds Goethe Institute Mexico/Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa)/Senatskanzlei für kulturelle Angelegenheiten Berlin, 2016 Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) Jardín cósmico Exhibition funding, 2014/15 Funding of a participative sculpture Project by the Patronato de la Industria Alemana para la Cultura and Goethe Institute Mexico, 2014 Grant by the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores México (SRE), 2011/12 Grant by the DAAD, 2011 Grant or a residency in Norway, Nominated for the award of the masterclass by the President of the Universität der Künste Berlin, 2005 woodcut grant by the Walter-Stöhrer Fundation.


ROXANNE JACKSON
b.Hayward, California, USA
Lives and works in New York

Roxanne Jackson is a ceramic artist and mixed-media sculptor living in Brooklyn, NY. Her macabre works are black-humored investigations of the links between transformation, myth, and kitsch. She has shown in China, Portugal, Romania, Canada, and such cities as London, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Brussels and Leipzig. Jackson is the cofounder of NASTY WOMEN, a national/international art exhibition and fundraising project; and Heather Metal Parking Lot, a nocturnal outdoor heavy metal party, held each summer at the Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY.


SANTIAGO MERINO
b.Mexico City, Mexico, 1973
Lives and works in Mexico City

During the last decade, Santiago Merino has developed one of the most innovative visual arts productions in Mexico. His multiple artistic, technical and aesthetic-formal findings unify his work by linking the old traditions of Western painting with the legacies of twentieth-century modern and contemporary painting and the virtual and global circulation of twenty-first century images. His production encompasses more than twenty series and works, an important part of which he has developed by utilizing two principal techniques: the application of plastic materials such as industrial plastic wrap, and the adaptation of basic mechanical tools, ink markers and small rollers for example, with which he effects pictorial strokes in series.


YENI MAO
b. Canada, 1971
Lives and works in Mexico City and New York

Yeni Mao was born in Canada and studied at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, subsequently trained in metal casting in California, and the architecture and fabrication industries in New York. His work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, including Galerie Zidoun-Bossuyt in Luxembourg, Invisible-Exports in New York, and Arróniz Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. He has been awarded several residencies, including Casa Wabi, OAZO-AIR, Red Gate, and The Fountainhead. Yeni Mao's practice centers on the distortion of archetypical narratives, through a range of mediums including sculpture, installation, photography, and video. The work uses a diverse artistic lexicon to explore the cyclical regeneration of history, often with specific trans-national, historic, or mythological references. He is especially interested in oppositions such as magic vs. modernism and authenticity vs. history. Yeni Mao lives and works in Mexico City and New York.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:  

Anouk Kruithof , Clive Murphy , Cristina Tufiño , Eamon Ore Giron , Fernando González Gortázar , Jippies Asquerosos , JIS (José Ignacio Solórzano) , Kristin Reger , Marie Strauss , Roxanne Jackson , Santiago Merino , Yeni Mao .