Anarchy and Dialectic in Desire Pt 2

The second part of the exhibition, titled Anarchy, has been structured as an Artists’ Salon: a celebration and affirmation of art making as experimentation, investigation, and freedom of method. The exhibition is a celebration of formal exploration in art as a dynamic, open language without preestablished rules that at the same time functions as a political and strategic body.

In Nip-Nis. La Fleur de l’Age, Marta Pérez García takes the medium of printmaking to the extreme; through her refined use of the reduction technique, Pérez García generates a baroque composition that denounces gender violence to foreground her own circumstance as a Caribbean woman.

In Evolución del pensamiento [Evolution of Thought], printmaker Haydée Landing affirms her masterful technique and voice while evoking the beautiful relationship between body, spirit, and reason. The piece, which features a figure evolving, is a metaphor for both the evolution of thought and the body, and of our own sensitive subjectivity.

From a critical and intersectional gaze, Anarchy aims to foreground ruptures and connections about art making as a marginal practice. In its short but determined history, the MAC has served as a fundamental space for the exhibition, visibilization, and discussion of the creative work of marginal or non-conforming identities, as well as a place for the development of communities within an art scene that has disputed and resisted their presence due to gender, race, and/or social class.

In Comfort Zone [NOT OK], Sebastián Gutiérrez reaffirms the post-gender stage in which artistic endeavor finds itself in contemporary Puerto Rico. By placing fabric over wood, it becomes a ludic skin over an anatomic representation; the artist contrasts the term "comfort zone" with new possibilities of form and representation that transcend essential identity as it has been learned and socialized.

This Salon is conceived from the context of Puerto Rico’s marginal and critical situation—from its past to its current moment—not with the intention of inserting these works into hegemonic art history, but to question its authority, its discourses, and erasures.

In Obrero 1 [Laborer 1], Ada del Pilar Ortiz generates a sculpture as a second skin. A portrait traced from the conditions of a home that contains in its materiality, texture, and color the narratives of history and the lives of generations of laborers that were and still are—in spite constant erasures—a fundamental part of Puerto Rico’s economic, cultural, social, and historical development.

Unexpectedly framed within a global health emergency, and in the midst of the brutal deterioration of our ecosystem, Anarchy and Dialectic in Desire: Genders and Marginalities in Puerto Rico has become an even more necessary space today.

In Soft Spots, a piece that represents the beginnings of his creative exploration, trans-masculine, non-binary performance artist Christopher M. Korber uses the image to transgress the representation of the body and gender, and from there present fractures that allude to both pain and denouncement. In his more recent work as performer and Drag King, the artist, who no longer works in two-dimensional form, generates new instances and stages for political and aesthetic activism toward equity and identity freedom within a rigid cis-tem that insists on persisting.

Faced with the fragility of an uncertain future, looking back and recognizing our own struggles, affirms the fundamental contribution of the arts to our cultural and social well-being.

In Ciclos de fuego, Cecile Molina constructs metaphorical possibilities through an abstract three-dimensional approach that relates color, and organic forms to the female bone structure as possibility.

In Abrazo infrasónico [Infrasonic Embrace], Rebecca Adorno establishes metaphoric connections between art as an infinite space of multisensorial experimentation that translates and proposes affects to open perceptible frequencies, but expandible in the imaginable.

We must now ask ourselves: Where are we going? How much time do we have left? How will we make and show art in this future that is already beginning to determine us? What will those new (de)materialities be?

In the sound installation instrument(o):01, Carola Cintrón Moscoso posits the spectator’s body and actions as the fundamental element that makes the artist’s exploration possible. The invitation to touch and interact with the cables in the exhibition space generates unique, ephemeral, and diverse multisensory experiences.

Anarchy reaffirms the creators that are included as transcendental figures in the history of Puerto Rican art, in both the archipelago and the diaspora.

Ivelisse Jiménez continues building on a body of work that for 15 years has consistently invited us to reflect on the painting and its relationship to space, form, materiality, and color.

Immersed in this uncertain juncture, Anarchy invites the study of the artists on display from the awareness of its limited scope, recognizing that there are still many artists that must be recognized and visibilized.

For decades, multidisciplinary artist José Luis Cortés has built a body of experimental work in which he relates poverty and the ephemerality of materials with performance and corporeal action. In Residencial Puerta de Tierra, Cortés pays homage to the urban memory of a marginal space that was swept aside to satisfy a questionable desire for progress.

The work of Candida Alvarez employs a formal exploration where the materials emerge from her memories and her day-to-day experiences. In Dark Fair, Koln (AKA LAVA CARAMEL), her exploration using materials and light transcends the canvas and its two-dimensionality to move toward the space of the installation.

Although “not all are here, and not all the ones that are should be,” today Anarchy celebrates artistic endeavor in Puerto Rico.

In 2014, Dhara Rivera was invited along with other artists to build a piece commemorating what was at the time architect Henry Klumb’s home. The resulting piece evokes storm shelters. In this dystopian present, this installation-shelter compels us to reflect on our ephemeral reality, rethink our ecological footprint, and understand that we are but one living being within a larger ecosystem.

We celebrate its dynamism and its open and transgressive resolve to foster the broadness of our community, so that it serves as a platform for the development of creative strategies of solidarity and new voices that enrich our individual and collective lives.