Selected Past Exhibitions



Florencia Levy   Commute Portraits  
2009    Curated and essay by Cynthia Mulcahy
Centraltrak Artist Residency, Dallas, Texas
www.centraltrak.com


                                                     



                                           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, water-
                                           colors, 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

                                                      



                                                                                               













       

                                                                  
                                                                

                                                                  
                                                                        Nate Cassie's Put the needle on the record





                                                                                  

                                                                                    
                                                                                      Margaret Meehan's  Pity Party on the Mountain of Loneliness   
 





                                                             
                                                                    Rosalyn Bodycomb's Nocturnes






                                                              


                                                             
                                                                  Marcel Gautherot's 20th century modern photography of Oscar Niemeyer's Brasilia







                                                             
                                          

                                                       
                                                                                  Introduction:06   Heyd Fontenot (above), Victoria Montelongo and Michael Warren



  


                         
                                                                          
                                                                                 Celia Eberle's Theogony

                          
                   

                         
                                                                       
                                                                       
                                                                                   Introduction: 07  Margaret Meehan, Jonathan Marshall and Eric Zimmerman







                    

                                                                            

               

                                    Charlie Morris' Operations






                                                                             
                                                                              


                                                         
                                                                Brazilian Graffiti crew Fleshbeck Crew




 

                                                                   


                                                                   
                                                                       Jin-Ya Haung

   




                                                                   
                                                                       Meg Langhorne







                                                                        


                                                                
                                                                     Derrick Saunders