Mesoparasitio

Museo de Arte de El Salvador (MARTE)

MARTE Contemporáneo

Presents:

“Mesoparasitio” by Patricia Villalobos

July 21^st through September 25^th, 2011

Mesoparasitio <13 ° 41’ 33”N 89°14’30”W> is part of a series of onsite installations that invade the exhibit space with multiple elements adhered to the walls. The title combines two words: mesoparasite and site. The first word refers to the type of parasite that lives partially embedded in its host or in between two spaces. The second one makes reference to the action of surrounding or beseeching. The title also points out to the general coordinates for the Museum of Art of El Salvador as the exhibiting space, simultaneously functioning as the host to these camouflaged elements.

The art installation consists of hundreds of polystyrene sculptures and an audio composition. The sculptures make reference to outbreaks or rashes of different sizes and forms; some hybrid and unsual and others more familiar. The audio is composed of environmental and digital sound recordings - its origin oscillates between abstraction and representative sounds such as shots, helicopters, etc., that have been altered to create a contemplative space, along with the sculptures. The piece, thus, moves in between the interior and exterior, the unusual and the familiar, the visible and the invisible.

This art piece examines different situations and elements that appear to be harmless but are actually not; empowered-subordinate relationships, as well as latent motion systems that go unnoticed, and that gradually transform a whole entity. To a certain extent, the walls turn into the infection or contamination sites, where the concept of the noxious and besieged agents becomes abstracted and questioned. The sculptures have been arranged and grouped in a way that they reflect the current global conflict patterns; it suggests a continual state of transition, malleability and constant movement, echoing our contemporary condition.

Patricia Villalobos Echeverria

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Patricia Villalobos Echeverria was born in Tennessee, from Salvadorian parents; raised in Managua, Nicaragua. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Louisiana (1988) and her masters at the University of West Virginia (1990).

Recent individual exhibits include Outbreak at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh (2010); Aguasmalas (Blackwaters) at MediaNoche, New York (2008); Aflujo-Afflux at Artist Image Resource, Pisttsburgh and Laura Mesaros Gallery, Morgantown, West Virginia (2006); Alamar (Asea) at PROYECTO’ACE, Buenos Aires (2006) and Hoverings at Artist Image Resource, Pittsburgh.

Her work has been included in several exhibitions, some of which are: the VII Biennial of Visual Arts of Central America in Managua (2010): I International Triennial of the Caribbean (2010); IV Splitgraphic Biennale, Split, Croatia (2009) ; Gestures 13 at the Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh (2009); Transfer Lounge of Forge Contemporary Art, Valencia and SPACE Gallery, Pittsburgh (2009); Ecological Havoc at the Universidad Centro Americana-UCA-Managua (2009), Imprint 2008 : International Triennial of Graphic Arts, Warsaw, and the 3rd International Artist's Book Biennial, Alexandria, Egypt (2008).

The hybrid practice of engraving, photography, video, multiples and an installation that is developed by the artist explores reproducible forms of representation that alter our notions of singularity. Her art installations play with the tension between the three-dimensionality of the sculpture and the architecture, and at the same time, explore the ephemeral nature of the video and the sound. Her work examines power and dependency relationships through the sculptures that invade the architectural space, just as in videos that position the body within a political and transnational context. In this way, her work questions our sense of stability and how time can appear to stop when one enters or exists spaces in state of fluctuation – some may be geographical, others virtual, but they all point towards a concurrent state of dissolution (dissociation) and hyper-incarnation.

The MARTE Contemporary program is sponsored by Mario Cáder-Frech and the MARTE Contemporary Committee.