Ley Fuga
March 28 to May 24, 2014
Opening Friday, March 28, 7 to 10pm
In his first exhibition in Canada, Ley Fuga introduces
the video work of Mexican artist Edgardo Aragón. A native of the
southern state of Oaxaca, Aragón uses three generations of his own
family as well as the landscape itself as protagonists in poetic
reenactments of rural life under narco rule. Oblique yet harrowing in
their elegance and restraint, these videos function as microhistories
encapsulating familial narratives and oral histories situated in the
spartan aesthetics of the countryside while eschewing the stereotypical
visual violence of necropolitics.
In Efectos de Familia,
Aragón's younger male family members perform a series of actions that
quickly and cumulatively reveal themselves to be re-enactents of
traumatic historical events—"a series of small exercises exploring
masculinity and the power relationships that exist in Mexican
society"—boys miming chicinarcos emulating the infinitely expanding
vocabulary of death in the cartels' perverse lexicon of crime and
punishment. The dislocative properties of power imposed on a powerless
landscape frame La Trampa, a three-channel installation that
features a split focus rural vista, overlaid with the performance of a
lost but resurrected corrido commemorating the 1979 massacre by Mexican
federales of peasants caught harvesting marijuana. In the video, Aragón
sends a small airplane over these locations like a ghost, while the
camera lingers on the remains of another that never made it out. Matamoros feels like a road movie—a picturesque travelogue, punctuated by security checkpoints, from
the tiny town of Otumba in Oaxaca to the Texas border. The narrator,
Pedro Vasquez Reyes, gradually reveals his story as a drug mule hauling
marijuana and cash in his VW, and his subsequent arrest and lengthy
incarnation in Tamaulipas. That Reyes has undertaken this criminal
enterprise as a means to support his family becomes particularly
resonant when we learn he is a pseudonym for the artist's father.
Ley Fuga ("the
law of flight" or simply "vanishing act") is an archaic term for a type
of extrajudicial execution commonly used during the Mexican Revolution,
wherein a prisoner is shot in the back while his captors simulate his
"escape." In this eponymous work, Aragón constructs a symbolic suicide
as a man removes his shirt, drapes it on the mast of a small raft in a
stream and, as it begins to drift out beyond his reach, fires on it.
Describing his output as "the dismembering of my own history, my family,
my village, my origins which lead to a deeply pessimistic vision that
is borderline nihilistic despite the visual poetics of the
work," Aragón nonetheless reveals political and economic realities:
occult unsung histories which the power elite—politicians and
narcotraficantes alike—would prefer moulder, unremembered and
undisturbed.
Edgardo Aragón
(born 1985) received his B.A. in Fine Arts from ENPEG la Esmeralda,
Mexico City. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at
institutions including Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo (Mexico
City), MoMA P.S.1 (New York) and Luckman Gallery (Los Angeles), as well
as group exhibitions including Resisting the Present, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Disponible: A Kind of Mexican Show, San Francisco Art Institute, Historias Fugaces, Laboral Centro de Arte Gijon and El horizonte del topo,
Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. Aragón's work was included in the 3rd
Moscow Biennial of Young Artists, the 12th Istanbul Biennial, and the
8th Mercosur Biennial. His films have been screened at festivals in
Werkletiz, Marseille and Mexico City. He lives and works in Oaxaca and
Mexico City.
Contact: Deborah de Boer, 250 385 3327, delugeart@shaw.ca
Deluge
gratefully acknowledges the support of the CRD Arts Development Service
through the participating municipalities of Esquimalt, Highlands,
Metchosin, Oak Bay, Saanich, Sidney, Victoria and View Royal; the
Province of British Columbia; British Columbia Arts Council; Proyectos
Monclova, Mexico City.
Ley Fuga is co-presented by Diluvio Arte e Ideas, Mexico City.
Deluge Contemporary Art
636 Yates St, Victoria, BC, Canada V8W 1L3
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