Curator Cynthia Mulcahy also contributed an essay to the 2008 exhibition Commute Portraits, a solo exhibition by Centraltrak artist-in-residence
Florencia Levy of Buenos Aires, Argentina, on view at the artist residency program Centraltrak. www.centraltrak.org for more information.
Installation view of Florencia Levy's Commute Portraits at Centraltrak 30 January - 18 March 09
French poet Charles Baudelaire described the
nineteenth-century flaneur, an observer of social life in the city, as
a "botanist of the sidewalk."
Admittedly, artist Florencia Levy might also be described in like manner for her empirical investigations of contemporary everyday life in her own
city of Buenos Aires.
The recent project Local Tourism
began when the artist informed friends and family she was leaving on
vacation for a month or so, the putative
assumption being, of course,
that she was elsewhere in another city. Rather, the artist
sojourned in her own city, staying at a succession of cheap
hotels near
the city center, a different one every night. She frequented local
landmarks, mailed postcards to loved ones, and recorded her daily
observations. The result was a video work and series of photographs of
poetic narrative and conceptual force.
Another recent body of
work was based on the artist assuming the role of an interested tenant
and visiting tens of dozens of empty apartments for
rent in her city.
She has also made audio guides of city bus routes in Argentina
that one can follow. Accident introduced her to Mr. Torres, a Peruvian
immigrant fabric cutter in Buenos Aires, and his window stuffed plant
collection growing in soil smuggled from his native country. The
artist told his
story through text and images and handed out a thousand
flyers to the serried crowds crossing on the corner streets of Senor
Torres’ garment
district studio.
In Commute Portraits, her latest exhibition, Levy, while in residence as an artist at Centraltrak in Dallas, Texas, accompanied commuters on their
daily walks, drives, or public transport commutes – be they
cowboy farriers, fellow artists or recent immigrants from Mexico.
Through video, installation,
photographs, watercolors, text and
objects, which include cut Oleander flowers, a neon Pitt Grill sign, a
tiny viewfinder and a model airplane, Levy
captures what
nineteenth-century journalist Victor Fournel in writing about the
artist-as-explorer referred to as "the confessions, antipathies and
admirations of the crowd.”
In all these works, it’s less
about Levy’s experiences than it is about what people and place reveal.
The artist unspools these revelations and reworks
them, often in
adumbrated form such as the video work The Master Farrier, part one which counterpoints fact and fiction, myth and reality, in a deadpan
and hilarious morality play.
- Cynthia Mulcahy
Mulcahy Modern artist Akintunde Akinleye's images of a Lagos, Nigeria
oil pipeline explosion in 2006. Akinleye was awarded photography's
prestigious
World Press Photo 1st Prize Singles Award in 2007 for his photograph
(top image). Editioned photographs. Contact Mulcahy Modern for more details.
Other images by Akintunde Akinleye: Lagos bus Plastic bag menders at Lagos dump Published in The New York Times 2007
All images and content copyright Mulcahy Modern 2009.