 Mauricio Guillen Yo no cruce, la frontera, la frontera crossed me f a projects is pleased to announce the first London solo show of the UK-based Mexican artist Mauricio Guillen. The exhibition presents a body of new works, all exploring the notion of physical and conceptual borders through the use of photography, sculpture and conceptual strategies. Lines, boundaries and frontiers are instruments of division. They function to protect the inside from the danger and chaos of the outside. The artist is interested in making visible their influence on our behaviour, especially when the frontier is itself invisible. The site specific work "Broken Silver Line" (2006) occupies the entire main gallery. The floor is covered with tree leaves, onto which the artist has traced a silver straight line dividing the space into two portions. Subsequent to this imposition of order over a natural support, the leaves have been entropically mixed up by the artist and later by visitors walking over them. In contrast to such an irreversible process of making a divide insignificant, the work exhibited in the smaller gallery, "Running Pink Line" (2005), physically extends the notion of border to make evident the absurdity of its implication. The work documents a sculptural installation in Basel in which Guillen had extended with a pink thread the boundary dividing two properties into the adjacent neighbouring space, cutting through houses, gardens and public space. These very simple gestures expose, through the hyperbolic use of the oppositions straight-broken and extension-fragmentation, the complexity of the ideological operation of partition of reality, through which our property and identity are structured. In the work "I Don't Believe in Aliens" (2006), the artist employs four lithographs illustrating the first German guide to Mexico, published in the 18th century. The found images all depict an idyllic landscape, usually with volcanoes and a lush valley where some travellers are caught admiring the exotic surroundings. Guillen has cut out a rhomboid shape from every print, evicting any human presence from the image. In a cleaning operation not dissimilar from the CIA's "Extraordinary Rendition", the undesired alien is extradited and forced out of the picture. The work combines in the same frame a photograph of the book showing the modified pages juxtaposed to the real 18th cut-out relic teletransported side by side. The colonial figure of the explorer conquering the New Continent and the current US fixation with homeland protection against any external menaces are equated here, with the effect of doubling the contradiction implicit in the provisional notion of frontiers as the human articulation of power in space. Mauricio Guillen was born in Mexico in 1971. He completed his MA at the Royal College of Art in 2003, and the following year showed the project "Peripheries" in f a projects project space. He was included in "New Contemporaries", the East End Academy at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and "The Truth Society" at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art. Other exhibitions include a solo show at Guild and Greyshkull, New York, the installation of the work "Mingle" at Art Basel Miami Beach 2005 as part of the Art Projects Section, the 5th Bienal de Mercosul, Puerto Allegro, Brazil in which he represented Mexico, and "Misunderstanding" at GAM, Mexico City. Upcoming exhibitions include "Only the Paranoid Survive" at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art and an exhibition curated by Kay Pallister and Charles Asprey at the Bethlehem Peace Centre, Palestine. His work is represented in collections in the UK, Greece, Switzerland and the US and South America. Exhibition: 2 March - 1 April 2006 Gallery hours: Tues-Fri 10am - 6pm, Sat 12 - 5pm f a projects 1-2 Bear Gardens GB-London SE1 9ED Telephone +44 020.7928 3228 Fax +44 020.7928 5123 Email info@faprojects.com www.faprojects.com |
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