Walked around town like a wired zombie. Couldn't sleep for anything last night, decided to spend tonight at our old apartment in Rosarito, where there is an autumn chill in the air & a few hundred less cabs & busses & motorcycles racing in the streets.
A real find. The TJ in China Project Space, a nice whitewall gallery competing for slickness with its much more commercial neighbors. The project, started by Tijuana artists Mely Barragan & Daniel Ruanova, puts the city's artists into an international context by exhibiting them with Chinese & other artists in a Beijing space hosted by Ai Weiwei.
As artist & TJ in China collective member Talia Perez explained to me, they are following a "Glocal" model, thinking globally on a local scale.
The current show in the Avenida Revolucion space is heavy on conceptual art strategies, applying the methods of science & surveillance technology to a transformational reading of cinema and robotics. For instance, Monterey - based artist Ernesto Walker randomly sets a minature robot on a Mars Voyager-like trek about the space via remote control. A very fun & mystifying exhibit, the best I've seen since I got here.
I first came across Tijuana art through projects launched in the eighties, a kind of confrontational conceptualism that set out to show Californians just how Mexican their roots are. Talia Perez agreed that you don't see a lot of that kind of art in Tijuana, mostly because younger artists have little sense of recent art history. She pointed out that galleries like 206 Arte Contemporaneo & Blastula are trying to raise the level of discourse by holding talks & workshops on art history & criticism.
Heading back to TJ tomorrow for Turista Libre's bus tour of sites participating in the First International Photography Festival Tijuana. Should be fun. I should be well-rested.
No comments:
Post a Comment