Bodegón
Andrés Monzón-Aguirre
Jeffrey Stark
Oct 31 - Nov 21, 2021
Press Release
Jeffrey Stark is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Andrés Monzón-Aguirre. The exhibition will be on view from October 31st through November 21st, 2021. An opening reception will be held on Sunday, October 31st from 4:00 - 6:00 p.m.
Andrés Monzón-Aguirre translates displacement and ancestral memory into sculpture and other media. Referencing Quimbaya iconography of the Antioquia and Cauca regions of Colombia, Monzón-Aguirre abstracts personal and collective imagery as an act of remembrance and a working through of grief and violence. The Bodegón series presented here for the first time in the US offers a cast interpretation of their ceramic pyramid - a stack of spheres that cites the familiar form of fruits, vegetables, and seeds seen in informal and traveling fruit strands across the Global South and its diaspora. In this process of exchange between the origin-specific, and this commercial storefront in Chinatown, the artist comments on their migration while acknowledging the universality of this global exchange of goods and ideas.
Working from the replica as a point of departure, Monzón-Aguirre contemplates centuries of loss and displacement with their geometric interpretations of indigenous Andean vessels and adornments. Although their objects reference Quimbaya and Tumaco-La Tolita goldsmithing and ceramics, the space between these histories and the artist’s scattered lineage suggests a rupture of relations; an errantry set forth by Glissant in which displacement turns to wander and the fruitful possibilities of self-determining relations in exile. Through choices of color, material, and form that acknowledge inherited and unearthed relations, Monzón-Aguirre’s Bodegón offers a maquette for the future.
While the artist has been researching ceramic processes and production in Medellin for the past decade, this installation accepts the material challenges of working within liminality. The spheres here are based on Monzón-Aguirre’s glazed ceramics, which appear lightly-speckled and metallic from hematite crystals developed in a wood-fired kiln. Here, far from the earth and kiln, the artist turns to an architectural and site-specific response to the East Broadway storefront. Suspended as the artist is uprooted, this plaster and limestone pyramid becomes a temporary answer to the work’s enduring question - when cultural origin is detranscendentalized into fiction*; what are the forms universal to our collective being? This architectural gesture of abundance and repetition suggests the answer is many.
* From Gayatri Spivak’s Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, where she asks how the impossible experience of alterity might offer collectivities in the diaspora.
Exhibition text by Elena Ketelsen-González
Thank you: Simone Leigh. Artwork created by Andrés Monzón-Aguirre with Jill Cohen-Nuñez, Ava Marzulli, Wing Yau.
This program is made possible by the New York City Artist Corps.