Unique: Nature

Unique : Nature Singular pieces by artists using image and photography as a tool to produce contemporary art, with methods and formats including print by pigment-transfer, pinhole-camera, photo-sculpture, video or NFT. This collective exhibition reflects on the representation itself and the materials supporting art, upon our relationship with nature.

The abstract forms on the works are reminiscent of the organic, while the representations of the landscape refer to the digital. In the pieces, uniqueness and experimentation coincide with notions of the ecological that refer to those described by Arturo Escobar (UNAULA. Colombia) in Sentirpensar: Cultural forms of inhabiting the planet and their own territories that establish new relationships with nature and with other human beings to maintain a spiritual and material balance with the cosmos.

The Metagraphies by Carlos Aguirre — seminal artist of conceptual art in Mexico — are built with photographic fragments and design materials recalling his large installations or his early graphic work. These domestic-sized pieces are the portrait of a whole, with fragments of times and spaces. In them: leaves and buildings are intertwined in different planes and scales to generate an hybrid ecosystem between the natural and the digital, the classic and the contemporary, the flat and the voluminous.

During a trip to Bhutan in 2014, Shibu Arakkal captured the image on display with a pinhole-camera, one of the precursor techniques of photography which generates oniric atmospheres in the film. The size and the montage compose a single image as proof of a long journey. This image is the only record of an evidence remaining only in the memory of the artist who produces landscape photographic series around the world.

Aglae Cortés comments on the pieces which constitutes her project as current member of the National System of Art Creators of Mexico: On the one hand, they are an investigation of the desert, its sand, ashes, and urban land of my native Sonora to use them with the technique called print-by-pigment, one of the earliest forms of photography in a contemporary way. And on the other, they are images that bring together ideas such as time, origin, nature. What we see is sensitized desert sand on silver photographic paper. If the earth contains everything, it is not represented; it is presented.

Nicolás Janowski expresses about his series of GIF's available as NFT on the Zona Maco platform and soon exhibited by ALMANAQUE at Digital Art Hong Kong: The liquid snake, one of his most emblematic photographic series: The Amazon is neither human nor animal. She is a hybrid of nature. The mirror of human contradiction, of a world to which it belongs and yet remains distant. Even the disintegrated indigenous groups in the jungle, separated by their languages ​​but intimately linked by memory, share the same myths and religious convictions. In the transformation of the course of life, gradual but constant, the Amazon also modifies what approaches it.

Regarding the photographic series and the sculptures by Martin Levêque, the art historian Alberto Ríos de la Rosa noted; for Levêque, Arcadie is that idyllic space in which the overproduction and exploitation of natural resources is reduced by the recycling and reuse of its materials. The sculptures have been made from metal remains taken from art production workshops in Mexico City. The photographs in the series present a set of involuntary sculptures that question the notions of space, time and form in abstraction.

About the video-film Fables of the Anthropological Machine, its author Enrique Méndez de Hoyos, master of arts from NYU, mentions: The characters are at the crossroads of postmodernity, assuming the problem of the end of history and the position that the humanity in relation to nature in a posthistoric world. Barbara Cuadriello points out about the piece: It explores the concepts of nature and culture; swinging between one and the other to stop at the image, a place where both intertwine. The video seems to represent —in key of farce— a mythology without a clear geographical anchor.

Stuart Sandford's Polaroid Collages series suggests the original expression of collage: one decision, one cut and two stories that multiply. Taken by the artist himself among his friends and lovers, these instant-sculptures play with the notion of memory, desire and its context, questioning the physical nature of photography, the contemporary portrait and the posterity of images in times of Instagram.

Pavka Segura, a member of the National System of Creators, points out on his series awarded with the Honorable Mention at Mexico’s Biennale of Photography 2021: Although it was inevitable to wink to the pictorial still life, I think of these images as installations where time and light are the symbolic context to unfold a fragmented narrative. Also included in the exhibition is his Voluminescent Sphere composed of a threshold of light created with 36 layers of vegan paper that generates a light gradient. A subtle image that recalls the most recurrent form of nature present in the sun, the stars, cells or atoms.

The unique nature of these works reminds us that we are not –in front of–, –on– or  –in nature–, but rather we are part of it.

Arturo Delgado | ALMANAQUE fotográfica | 2022