artnexus #107

Home: So Different, So Appealing. Art from the Americas Since 1957, an exhibition at LACMA, was organized by the University of California’s Chicano Studies Research Center and curated by Mari Carmen Ramírez, Pilar Tompkins Rivas, and Chon Noriega. During Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA at Los Angeles. This exhibition explores the universal concept of home through nearly one hundred works by forty artists. Home: So Different, So Appealing traces issues like migration, personal memory, familial relationships, political situations, and architectural spaces across seven decades, setting artworks to dialog with one another, traversing generations and countries, and seeking to connect the symbolic value that the works have in the space and time covered. The work on our cover, Excision (2012), by Colombian artist Leyla Cárdenas (Bogotá, 1975) is among those featured in the exhibition. An exploration of both the elements that populate space and recovered fragments of known objects have dominated Cárdenas’ sculptural works in recent years. She investigates architectural ruins, the way in which the city retains traces of its past as it develops, and the superposition of changes caused by the passage of time. The fragment becomes central to her reconstruction of situations that look at the course of history and project themselves in the reformulation of the present. In Excision, Cárdenas reflects on the changes underwent by Bogotá under the directive of promoting an at times the debatable mode of development, a situation she visualizes by means of materials salvaged by a Nineteenth-Century house in the process of being torn down. In an archeological effort, Cárdenas appropriates sections of walls, ceilings, and furniture that account for the house’s past. In this process of salvage, she also rescues different aspects of the memory of the place, documents that bear witness to a forgotten past, building her sculptures with that which is being destroyed while at the same time exploring the unique traces left by the passage of time. 
IVONNE PINI