”Write up by Mauricio Alejo to be published in East City Art Journal”
I’m confident I will tour you through an unexpected approach to Maria Luz Bravo’s work.
Maria Luz hails from Mexico, this is not irrelevant as it adds a layer of complexity to her new production.
Is fair to say, good artists are always foreigners. Not necessarily in regards to the soil they live in; but to the uses and ways most people deploy to relate with reality. This is especially true about Bravo’s uncanny ability to transform what is profusely known to others, into a contained space of unfamiliarity and wonder. Her gaze is that of an alien. Within the landscape, she’s able to deal with two residual peripheries: things that are discarded and things that are at the fringe of our attention. The territory she comfortably inhabits is our mental state of distraction where irrelevant things calmly accommodate themselves. Her sensibility dignifies their humbleness and quietly brings them back to our consciousness by revealing meaningful visual relationships.
Dislodging the wondrous from the trivial is not a minor feat, and she does it effortlessly; so much, she creates the illusion that we were given material for pure visual contemplation. It’s possible to go about her work that way. Her images easily afford any inattentive gaze while still delivering their otherworldly ether. It feels like you can gloss over them, surfing from one to the other but I argue, three to four images in, you start noticing you were not provided with a polished surface. There’s friction that slows your pace. Something in every image anchors your attention. A visual substance around which every image organizes itself, creating a gravitational pull of its own.
At this point I’m obliged to mention that I’m primed by her previous production: While still living in Mexico, Bravo, delivered “Collateral Damage” 2010-2011 a project consisting of landscapes documented at the border town of Ciudad Juárez. The images show facilities, private and public, in a state of abandonment. This project bears witness to the despair resulting from the growing violence brought to the border by drug trafficking and growing social disparities. The images themselves -all in muted colors- are harmonious and unsettlingly quiet. Bravo presents us with the aftermath of an intangible and intricate international social conflict. By diffusing violence into invisibility, she makes it intensely ominous. I think this dense feeling of subtle alienation -like an emotional fog- is what oozes throughout her whole production.
For Glimpse Gathered, things are not different. Once in the gallery, you might think you are making your way through a landscape of unproblematic happenstances; but beautifully concealed, underneath the serenity of the images and videos, there’s a narrative of dialectic conflict making its way to the surface. It’s the violent relationship, well hidden, throughout history between nature and civilization; between private and public, between the center and the periphery.
If anything, like an impassive onlooker, Bravo’s artistic endeavor, has the ability to offer images as experience, not as judgments.
I find particularly pertinent that the exhibition starts with the image of a crooked log -nature- intersecting a protruding PVC pipe -man-made- mimicking each other, forming an improbable sculpture. The pipe and the whole background are white. The log and the whole ground are brown. The man-made and the natural are visually sharply divided but that divide is also symbolic.
Let’s take a look at another image where a stump is piercing a wooden fence. Succinctly: Any fence is a border; any piercing is an invasion and the image relevance -visual and symbolic- lays at the center, on the exposed surface of the stump’s amputated limb. That oval with concentric circles sucking in our vision is exactly where the evidence of the violence inflicted upon nature, resides.
Up and down, left to right, there’s a visual feature that abruptly disrupts the natural: The sudden fluorescent paper. The vivid blue paint spray on the leaves transforms the ground into an ambivalent sky landscape. The shedded petals of decaying feral roses paradoxically make for a beautiful pattern on the image’s surface. The sky, crossed by airplanes trails like shooting stems from the shrub below. The diptych equates a torn-apart flower on the floor, with an accidental drip painting. Here and there we see nature disrupted by the presence of intensely artificial materials.
There’s something of a post-apocalyptic world in Bravo’s images set forth by the absence of the human figure but the dreamlike quality of her scenes comes from the accumulation of ambiguous symbols within the ordinary that point toward something deeper, mysterious, and greater than the landscapes we are confronted with.
As in any dream, hers is a wondrous subjective vision. The only image depicting direct human presence happens to be a close-up of her own hand from her point of view holding a small leaf in a caring gesture. In this image her hand is out of focus, not quite asserting her own substantiality.
There’s no cynicism in her work but no gratuitous hope, either.
The prowess of her work expands to reflect on the medium itself. At the gallery space, there’s this video where you see two birds sitting on a power line. The piece lacks any narrative; it has no evolution, but the scene seems to have been taken through a window on a rainy day and time serves as means to contemplate the distortions on the image every time a raindrop drips down the glass. While the warping of the image acknowledges the mediation between reality and its depiction, it also offers a contemplative sight of unstable reality; going further on a much more basic level, this visual artifact, the watery vision, is in fact an emotionally loaded signifier that delivers the image intense pathos.
Bravo’s images come from the periphery -the unimportant- to the gallery which is a place of heightened observation. But she wants us to see them not only with our eyes but with our bodies. The unframed photographs pasted directly against the walls and floor, some of them bent, make us conscious of the object-hood of the print; and the different heights at which they hang or lay, address the viewer’s body awareness. Hers is an invitation to consider the materiality of the images and be mindful of our spatial relationship to them. In short, she wants us to be fully present. The space proposes the viewer to become a nomad and to embody the narrative. With this awareness of our own bodies, you walk to an unlit room where darkness provides you with the comfortable shelter of invisibility. This is the last room. There, we see different houses in wall-size projected videos. They are three projections side by side, slowly fading in and out to show a new home. We see those houses from afar, most of them at twilight or at night. Lights are on but duelers are no-shows. In that gallery room, a shift happens: you become the alien; you are piercing through their privacy; you’re the intruder. You are not included in that house’s inner life. You are outside the border. You are left alone. The only movement you witness is what happens on each house’s television screen. There’s no one. Your gaze looking for human presence is amputated but you’re still experiencing the infectious feeling of intrusion. Finally, what you are staring at, you realize, is another sterile public space, that of the zombie images of television.
I’m confident I will tour you through an unexpected approach to Maria Luz Bravo’s work.
Maria Luz hails from Mexico, this is not irrelevant as it adds a layer of complexity to her new production.
Is fair to say, good artists are always foreigners. Not necessarily in regards to the soil they live in; but to the uses and ways most people deploy to relate with reality. This is especially true about Bravo’s uncanny ability to transform what is profusely known to others, into a contained space of unfamiliarity and wonder. Her gaze is that of an alien. Within the landscape, she’s able to deal with two residual peripheries: things that are discarded and things that are at the fringe of our attention. The territory she comfortably inhabits is our mental state of distraction where irrelevant things calmly accommodate themselves. Her sensibility dignifies their humbleness and quietly brings them back to our consciousness by revealing meaningful visual relationships.
Dislodging the wondrous from the trivial is not a minor feat, and she does it effortlessly; so much, she creates the illusion that we were given material for pure visual contemplation. It’s possible to go about her work that way. Her images easily afford any inattentive gaze while still delivering their otherworldly ether. It feels like you can gloss over them, surfing from one to the other but I argue, three to four images in, you start noticing you were not provided with a polished surface. There’s friction that slows your pace. Something in every image anchors your attention. A visual substance around which every image organizes itself, creating a gravitational pull of its own.
At this point I’m obliged to mention that I’m primed by her previous production: While still living in Mexico, Bravo, delivered “Collateral Damage” 2010-2011 a project consisting of landscapes documented at the border town of Ciudad Juárez. The images show facilities, private and public, in a state of abandonment. This project bears witness to the despair resulting from the growing violence brought to the border by drug trafficking and growing social disparities. The images themselves -all in muted colors- are harmonious and unsettlingly quiet. Bravo presents us with the aftermath of an intangible and intricate international social conflict. By diffusing violence into invisibility, she makes it intensely ominous. I think this dense feeling of subtle alienation -like an emotional fog- is what oozes throughout her whole production.
For Glimpse Gathered, things are not different. Once in the gallery, you might think you are making your way through a landscape of unproblematic happenstances; but beautifully concealed, underneath the serenity of the images and videos, there’s a narrative of dialectic conflict making its way to the surface. It’s the violent relationship, well hidden, throughout history between nature and civilization; between private and public, between the center and the periphery.
If anything, like an impassive onlooker, Bravo’s artistic endeavor, has the ability to offer images as experience, not as judgments.
I find particularly pertinent that the exhibition starts with the image of a crooked log -nature- intersecting a protruding PVC pipe -man-made- mimicking each other, forming an improbable sculpture. The pipe and the whole background are white. The log and the whole ground are brown. The man-made and the natural are visually sharply divided but that divide is also symbolic.
Let’s take a look at another image where a stump is piercing a wooden fence. Succinctly: Any fence is a border; any piercing is an invasion and the image relevance -visual and symbolic- lays at the center, on the exposed surface of the stump’s amputated limb. That oval with concentric circles sucking in our vision is exactly where the evidence of the violence inflicted upon nature, resides.
Up and down, left to right, there’s a visual feature that abruptly disrupts the natural: The sudden fluorescent paper. The vivid blue paint spray on the leaves transforms the ground into an ambivalent sky landscape. The shedded petals of decaying feral roses paradoxically make for a beautiful pattern on the image’s surface. The sky, crossed by airplanes trails like shooting stems from the shrub below. The diptych equates a torn-apart flower on the floor, with an accidental drip painting. Here and there we see nature disrupted by the presence of intensely artificial materials.
There’s something of a post-apocalyptic world in Bravo’s images set forth by the absence of the human figure but the dreamlike quality of her scenes comes from the accumulation of ambiguous symbols within the ordinary that point toward something deeper, mysterious, and greater than the landscapes we are confronted with.
As in any dream, hers is a wondrous subjective vision. The only image depicting direct human presence happens to be a close-up of her own hand from her point of view holding a small leaf in a caring gesture. In this image her hand is out of focus, not quite asserting her own substantiality.
There’s no cynicism in her work but no gratuitous hope, either.
The prowess of her work expands to reflect on the medium itself. At the gallery space, there’s this video where you see two birds sitting on a power line. The piece lacks any narrative; it has no evolution, but the scene seems to have been taken through a window on a rainy day and time serves as means to contemplate the distortions on the image every time a raindrop drips down the glass. While the warping of the image acknowledges the mediation between reality and its depiction, it also offers a contemplative sight of unstable reality; going further on a much more basic level, this visual artifact, the watery vision, is in fact an emotionally loaded signifier that delivers the image intense pathos.
Bravo’s images come from the periphery -the unimportant- to the gallery which is a place of heightened observation. But she wants us to see them not only with our eyes but with our bodies. The unframed photographs pasted directly against the walls and floor, some of them bent, make us conscious of the object-hood of the print; and the different heights at which they hang or lay, address the viewer’s body awareness. Hers is an invitation to consider the materiality of the images and be mindful of our spatial relationship to them. In short, she wants us to be fully present. The space proposes the viewer to become a nomad and to embody the narrative. With this awareness of our own bodies, you walk to an unlit room where darkness provides you with the comfortable shelter of invisibility. This is the last room. There, we see different houses in wall-size projected videos. They are three projections side by side, slowly fading in and out to show a new home. We see those houses from afar, most of them at twilight or at night. Lights are on but duelers are no-shows. In that gallery room, a shift happens: you become the alien; you are piercing through their privacy; you’re the intruder. You are not included in that house’s inner life. You are outside the border. You are left alone. The only movement you witness is what happens on each house’s television screen. There’s no one. Your gaze looking for human presence is amputated but you’re still experiencing the infectious feeling of intrusion. Finally, what you are staring at, you realize, is another sterile public space, that of the zombie images of television.