'Sweet sugar' exhibit celebrates modernist architecture

BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
Aug. 27, 2009

In Katya Gardea Browne's latest Mexico City project, the museum no longer remains just a place to house artwork - it is a space to build the art around. The walls, the floors and the ceilings become incorporated into the pieces, building fluid installations for the one-month show.

Her "Sweet Sugar" exhibition opens tonight at the El Eco Experimental Museum in the city's central San Rafael neighborhood.

The four-piece project will run through Sept. 27 before ultimately being disassembled.

"My intention is that the pieces make you aware of the building itself," Gardea said in an interview earlier this month, at the start of the project's construction. "It is not like the pieces could be in any gallery, space or art fair. This is site specific."

The artistic endeavor includes architectural structures, moving installations, a video played on loop and puzzle-like wood pieces assembled on the floor. The exhibit title, inspired by the 1970s-era Rolling Stones song "Brown Sugar," is a poetic evocation hinting at the connection between the human body and nature and their material impositions, she said.

The Mexican-American artist, who splits her time between Berlin and Mexico City, said the exhibit culminates a year and a half of artistic investigation into the relations between body and architecture, space, modernist painting and abstraction. She began drafting ideas seven months ago in Berlin and started mounting the pieces after returning to Mexico.

Gardea's architectural exploit was developed in part as a celebration of El Eco's modernist designs, built in 1953 by German architect Mathias Goertiz. The Eco museum was renovated and eventually reopened in 2005 to bring the public together with experimental artists and their work.

"I'm fascinated with the architecture of this museum space because it's called 'emotional architecture,'" Gardea said, adding that the disproportionate walls and abnormally high and slanted ceilings "create some kind of tension when you walk it. It's quite majestic."

'SWEET' STRUCTURES

As visitors walk past the museum's black stucco exterior walls and through a narrow passageway, the first piece that comes into view is a grouping of small geometric pieces scattered on the floor. The untitled work features various wooden planks painted bright primary colors and fit together like pieces of a puzzle. Large canvas recreations of Gardea's sketches hang on the surrounding walls, detailing her artistic process on projects developed in Berlin and Mexico.

In a small dark room tucked off to the side, her audio-visual installation "Berlin Water Light" projects deep blue waves onto the rectangular screen. The video captures ripples of the river running through the former territorial boundaries in East Berlin established by France, Britain and the United States following World War II.

Gardea's interactive piece "Auto-Colapsable con una sola cuerdO ("Self-collapsible with a single rope") incorporates two motors and an overhead camera, constantly changing viewers' horizontal and vertical perspectives of the woodwork.

The camera will also record the piece for about a week, and the video will eventually become part of the piece itself.

"A lot of my work is references, documenting time," she said. "You could call it a register, the document that becomes the final artwork."

Her principal piece, however, is outside in El Eco's brick patio. The crisscrossed, multi-layered scaffolding leans against the stucco walls and features large block letters and pyrotechnics that spell out "Sweet Sugar," the structure's individual title.

In designing and constructing the exhibition, Gardea said, she was concerned with "perception of how you move through these spaces. It's a physical relationship that you have to objects or your surrounding."

GLOBAL INSPIRATION

Gardea's fascination with proportions, space and physical structures began when, as a child, she observed the architectural contrasts between pre-Hispanic, colonial-era and modern day structures throughout Mexico City.

She initially developed her artistic career in New York City, where she studied fine arts and focused mostly on conceptual and modernist painting. When she starting to split her time between Berlin and Mexico City, she began translating her work on canvas into physical structures.

For her 2007 project "Tree Intervention on Lake Texcoco," for example, she moved a large tree from Xochimilco to the dried salt beds of the Ecatepec-area lake, part of a group show called Platform for Urban Investigation. Her 2006 installation "Trees From my Childwood" included images of trees projected with green light onto staggered screens. She has also exhibited various pieces in Berlin, though the bulk of her installations have been in Mexico.

"My video and sculpture are very much related to the work I was doing in New York," she said. "This is a progression of what I was doing, but with different media."

Her "Sweet Sugar" project will be taken down at the end of September and will possibly be reconstructed in Berlin, where Gardea will return to following the exhibition.

"I'm making sure that this exposition can be put together in a way that it can be dismantled and reset, but in a totally different configuration," she said.

"It's not a pile of wood that is thrown out, the idea is for it to have some kind of permanence. It's not an ephemeral installation. It will not be the same version - this is Version One."

"I find a lot of my pieces have different readings in different places, and this has been an important time of exploration and culmination of a body of work. I'd like to see it presented and recontextualized in other cities, in other places."