LOS ENCUENTROS
The formal and conceptual terrain represented in “Los Encuentros” is as vast as the geographical area from which the artists are drawn. The show includes painting, photography, sculpture, video, installation, and mixed-media work; crisply representational imagery and spare abstraction; religious symbolism, romantic landscape, and terse political commentary. Nevertheless there are common strains.
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Some of the work in “Los Encuentros” investigates how we understand ourselves as physical creatures. In her Journal of the Body, a series of 13 laser prints, Laura Gonzalez (from Mexico, currently living in Barcelona) depicts the many ways she sees her own frame, in an effort reminiscent of the U.S. “women’s art” movement in the 1970s, when women turned to their own bodies to reclaim from a patriarchal culture their own experiences. Photographic depictions of a single female body–perhaps self-portraits–are overlaid by chalky drawings of body parts, Spanish text, and indecipherable scratches of color. Some of the inscriptions seem benign: que esta una caja (this is a body); agua (water) and tierra (land). But quickly the text turns somber. One body is labeled armadura, which translates as “suit of armor” or “reinforcing bars,” or, as in armadura de la cama, “bed frame.” One picture screams VIDA PRIVADA (private life), as if to warn the viewer of sacred territory or lament the subject’s loss of control over her own body. Another image features the head, and its look of blank incomprehension makes it appear the owner had little to say about how her body was defined.
Raul Cristancho can certainly be found in his. Self Portrait With Emblem and Animal Alter-Ego is a triptych oil painting with a murky rendering of the Colombian artist’s face on one side and the head of a cat on the other. Between the two is a clean row of alternating symbols spanning the long, narrow center panel: fleurs-de-lis, centuries-old emblems of European imperial power, appear alongside iconic depictions of corn, the manna of the New World. Cristancho’s self-portrait positions him at the intersection of vastly different realms–one formal and one spiritual. He’s simultaneously a citizen of a postcolonial society and an older, precolonial world.
Such geographic and cultural distances are shrinking, however. Once the nation’s busiest railroad hub, Chicago now boasts the world’s busiest airport. In 1987, the year Agois made Puntos Cardinales and finished her MFA, Illinois officially admitted 160 immigrants from her native country. Nearly 5,000 came to the state from Mexico that year, another 984 from Central America. Certainly many more people came unofficially, without documentation, green cards, or basic welfare entitlements. In 1980, the last year for which estimates are currently available, well over a million Illinoisans spoke a language other than English at home; nearly 141,000 children in the state spoke Spanish with their families. The world of “Los Encuentros” is, quite literally, at our doorstep. No visa required.
