South likes: Ishmael Randall-Weeks at Arróniz, Mexico City

South likes: Ishmael Randall-Weeks at Arróniz, Mexico City
Escombrosos
Arróniz Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico
6 May – 5 July, 2014

Text by Klea Charitou

Questioning the bedrocks of our conventions, Peruvian artist Ishmael Randall-Weeks attempts a personal answer through his second solo exhibition at Arróniz gallery where he converts the space into a construction site of thoughts. The surroundings of the building are transferred inside, where a conceptual token of the construction process is on view. The most resistant materials appear eroded, the foundations rickety and our acknowledgments disputed and transfigured into debris—which is the title of the show. Debris is also the title of a piece that presents light jet prints of ruins as civilisation’s left over pieces. The reflection on the humankind’s voyage through modernity and its indicative failure continues with an installation, floating in a circle over our heads, made of bricks collected from different demolitions around Mexico City. The vulnerability of the materials is made evident by the porosity of the surface, in the fractures of the intermittent construction. Or in the clear glass of the twenty-one beams of The measurement of meaning, which gives the sense of an unsteady structure where our concepts are deposited in a precarious way. In Pillars, four columns made of concrete and built-in books function as the framework of an imaginary building or the basis of our ideas, where the different layers of the materials reveal their historical and sensitive burden. Behind them, Landscapes I, III broaden our horizon. The most durable forms have been corroded by nature, forcing us to redefine our measures, improve our techniques, question our position, our progress and waste and, through a piece like Exercises for a new world, reconsider life itself and the different social dynamics.

http://www.arroniz-arte.com/content/Escombros