PVR Visual Artist

Introduction

My art installations and photographic series are mainly based on three concepts: fractal repetition, virtuality of the image and the human condition.

Fractality

The most essential condition in the development of my aesthetic vision is the continuous cyclical repetition of the same image. The fractal way of constructing visual codes generates its own particular language. This obsession with revealing the image of the image, the hidden detail exposed in an insinuating way, transforms the object into the representation of the concept. In other words, the use of monochromization (use of a single color) across several images, creates similarity between concepts that are usually opposites.

Virtuality

Image virtuality is another recurring idea in the development of this aesthetic proposal. The inferred iconography in each installation’s assembly is created by two juxtaposed images. Superimposing these two images on an object or body creates a third virtual image which serves to contrast the concepts in visual terms.

Human Condition

The human experience is, in terms of content, the third element at work in this visual approach. This aesthetic proposal tends to interpret, associate and allude to conditions, behaviors or rites of the human species. In some way, these human conditions or situations define or relate a particular way of conceiving and establishing the ambivalence of choice.

“Morose Delectation on Blue Roses”

Place: silos at Parque de Los Reyes, Santiago, Chile
Date: April 16, 1997
Audience: 300 spectators

Morose Delectation on Blue Roses is a multimedia performance developed and displayed by seven slide projection units (in simultaneous use), a video projection unit and a concrete music soundtrack. The different formats produce an audiovisual sequence lasting 15 minutes.

The mise in scene, the operations of concealing and insinuation of this aesthetic of virginal passion, or, in other words, the feminine vision and(of feminine) desire veiled and unveiled in this(it’s) seduction for(by) purity, wish to thematize and problematize the female body as virtuality of the habitable , which it is contended for the same passion that goes beyond – exceeded by this passion that itself contains, in the most voracious and extreme way. Abstinence and purity – only make sense within an economy of accumulation for a final and infinite excess, sacredly violent.

“I Will Always Love You”

Place: Museo de Los Tajamares, Art Museum belonging to the cultural corporation of the Municipality of Providencia, Santiago, Chile
Date: November 6, 2000
Audience: 300 spectators

“I Will Always Love You” is an installation consisting of four retro illuminated boxes containing and exhibiting slides of married couples, a six “bed-boxes”, that reproduce the nuptial bed, with small paper dolls in wedding dress on top. The light-boxes that, placed on the wall, form a horizontal line, wish to utilize and reproduce the comics and animation type of sequence, although in a more allusive than narrative sense.

The “bed-boxes” are placed on the floor covered with paper blond lace for cakes, that reproduce the brides extend wedding dress and/or the great nuptial bed. These white boxes also make a double reference, on the hand, they remind of the virginal innocence of an idealized “sleeping beauty’s” bed, and, on the other hand, they refer to the wedding cake that wishes to reproduce the same immaculate and white appearance of the untouched and unaltered. This double simulation wishes to refer the materials- and their characteristics (white, soft, untouched, impeccable, etc.)- that traditionally proportion the kitsch and glamour of the nuptial paraphernalia.

This work is based on the ritual ceremony of marriage as a public ceremony of a private or intimate space. The photographically mediated visuality does not only register the strictly protocolar sequences that compose and complete this ritual but also captures(in a revealing manner) the instants that go beyond the purity through which it pretends to legitimate the union celebrated in marriage as such. It exposes the constant desire that charges and underlies all gestures of complicity and reveals the intimate emotions that only belongs to the couples’ privacy.

The image freezes and contains the rigorous order of the ritual ceremony, and, at the same time, liberates and exhibits, as an unseen witness- a voyeur-, all the non-programmed and generally constrained gestures.

“11 de Septiembre de 1973 /September 11, 2001”

Place: University Wisconsin Green Bay Art Building, Room 407/Art Studio
Date: May 6, 2002
Audience: 150 spectators

The idea behind this work originated from the obsession to explore cyclical images in their first stage. The fractal repetition of objects of seduction is the way I construct the meaning of my work.

Suddenly, the events of September 11 gave meaning to my exploration of cyclical images. With the terrorist attacks, the comfortable life, apparent safety and control enjoyed in this country changed in the most brutal and cruel way ever imagined.

On the fatal morning of September 11, 1973, the military’s takeover of Chile began with the aerial bombardment of the Moneda, the capital building of the Chilean government.

September 11 in the United States awakened images dormant in the collective unconsciousness of all the people of Chile. A sense of dark, sinister and sudden loss increases the human pain in the search for missing bodies. The body is the icon that remains hidden in the process of the search. Its “absence” refers to the materialistic life of the missing people. In the immediacy of the deepest feelings of those who have lost a loved one, or in the collective unconsciousness that also absorbs the human loss, the absence gets transformed.

Never is the meaning of country or nation, to which one belongs, more evident than when distance acts as the lens that divides each and every one of the memories…the scents… the events.

In the same way, that distance allows one to see and synthesize similarities and differences in relation to a personal and cultural death, even if one does not have the direct experience of looking for a missing person.

This exhibition does not pretend to homogenize specific reasons for these two similar events. Obviously the causes and the historical context in which the military coup originated in Chile and the terrorist attacks in the United States are different. However, I believe this piece exhibits the undeniable connection between dates, images and one of the most violent ways in which death has meaning, these events of presumed dead.

“Beyond Red”

Place: Campus Center, St. Norbert College, De Pere, WI, US,
Date: December 8, 2004
Audience: 100 spectators

“Beyond Red” is a 20 minute multimedia installation which consists of one main video projection and sound with two simultaneous slideshows. “Beyond Red” is a visual approach to discover the non-conventional beauty and its incredible paradox on ethnic mixes in this eclectic country(US), where everything is combined in the most hybrid and seductive vestiges of human relationships. It’s a different way to appreciate the multiplicity and unique merger of beauty from race, spirituality and gender features that which American society has brought through its own origin of immigrants from vast and diverse backgrounds.

“Behind the Layers”

Place: abandoned quarry at Ledgeview nature Center, Chilton, Wisconsin United States
Date: May 19 -20 and 26 –27, 2006
Audience: 350 spectators

“Behind the Layers” is a 20 minutes multimedia projection over one of the sections of the Niagara Escarpment in the Ledgeview Nature Center. This multimedia performance is developed and displayed by fourth slide projection units (in simultaneous use), a video projection unit and a concrete music soundtrack.

This artwork is based on the science of latent geological stratification in a local land formation. This multimedia is an approach to the Niagara Escarpment as a very unique development and combination of distinct natural transformations over time of land that forms the common ground of life in a great arc stretching from eastern Wisconsin to Niagara Falls.

The main concept of this artwork is the fractal foundation of different layers through millions of years. The visual icon of this multimedia is an animated transformation of a Wisconsin fossil figure to help viewers perceive the existence of a very powerful heritage from the oldest record of time to the present as a fundamental part of a major ecological system.

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