Leslie Moody Castro

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  picks April 19, 2016

  Mario García Torres

  Mario García Torres’s exhibition “Caminar Juntos” (Let’s Walk Together) is held at four different locations across Mexico City but all within the parameters of the artist’s Museo de Arte Sacramento, a “museum without walls” in the state of Coahuila, Mexico, conceived by the artist between 2002 and 2004. Theoretically, all of this show is included in the geographic space of Torres’s museum. The work Redrawing the Exhibition Space or Museo de Arte Sacramento in Mexico City, 2004–15, presents the floor plan of his institution, which is nearly 200,000 square feet, superimposed over a section of the

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  picks October 30, 2015

  Margaret Meehan

  “Every Witch Way but Loose” is a complex show in which Margaret Meehan takes on a variety of sources and images—from cinema, music, feminist activism and suffrage to Nancy Sinatra’s iconic 1966 song “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”—to explore and illuminate present-day hostilities toward women and reproductive rights in the United States. The entrance of the exhibition is replete with three drawings: A Study in Human Dignity, Sun on the Horizon, and White Cake (all works cited, 2015), which take specific scenes from the movies Rosemary’s Baby and Harold and Maude—featuring actress Ruth Gordon’s

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  picks August 13, 2015

  “A Room of One’s Own”

  “A Room of One’s Own” offers three site-specific video works, by artists Melanie Smith, Katri Walker, and Jaki Irvine in order to explore postcolonial Mexico through the moving image while exposing the antiquated gender divides inherent to the quotidian experience of Mexico City. Two works in particular, purchase without E (all works cited, 2015) by Jaki Irvine and Trip the Light by Katri Walker, reflect, respectively, on the nuances of sound throughout the city and on the gender binary. Trip the Light is a two-channel video piece highlighting two protagonists of a bullfight—the bullfighter

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  picks July 20, 2015

  Alejandro Diaz

  “It Takes a Village,” Alejandro Diaz’s latest solo exhibition, pulls together a seemingly disparate variety of references from Minimalism, Conceptualism, Abstract Expressionism, and even British Pop to unapologetically expose the reality of quotidian life in the artist’s own personal interest in South Texas, and specifically San Antonio.

  Immediately, three sculptures steal the polemical spotlight. Together titled Muebles Diaz (Furniture Diaz), 2015, they comment on the power structures governing migrant labor in South Texas by mimicking the methods of objectification in the sculptures of British

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  diary April 03, 2015

  Border Lines

  IT’S A RARE DAY that the small city of Matamoros, Mexico, receives international attention in the world of contemporary art. Matamoros sits on the exact opposite side of the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, a growing town on the southernmost tip of the state. For many years the Matamoros-Brownsville metropolitan area has been marred by cartel violence, drug and human trafficking, and recently the construction of the border wall, a concretization of US policies against undocumented border crossing.

  Matamoros has the feel of a civil-war zone, where residents simply draw their curtains and live

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  picks March 18, 2015

  Daniel Monroy Cuevas

  “Espectador en el vacio” (Spectator in the Void) is a highly technical, minimal, and potentially difficult exhibition to grasp. This, however, is just what artist Daniel Monroy Cuevas intended, and from the title, it’s clear the audience will operate in a void or vacuum, allowing for a mysterious narrative to evolve into a space of wonder.

  Six works occupy the three spaces of the gallery, including Spectator in the Void (all works cited 2015), a grouping of balls of various sizes made from wrapping VHS tape around itself so precisely that it’s nearly impossible to see the seams of the individual

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  picks February 05, 2015

  “Transcripciones”

  Writing is not an innocent act; it carries weight that can be both aesthetic and confrontational. “Transcripciones” at Museo el Chopo draws from the writings of the prolific Salvador Elizondo, well known in twentieth-century Mexico for his multidisciplinary and literary approach, to build a comprehensive exploration of how contemporary artists use written alphabets in converging and diverging interdisciplinary practices.

  With twenty-seven remarkable artists’ works on view, the exhibition unites video, tapestry, sculpture, and drawing to touch upon various ways in which the physical act of writing

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  picks February 03, 2015

  Borderland Collective

  Any exhibition that takes its starting point from the long and complex history between the United States and Central America is destined to be a difficult one. Borderland Collective, led by artists Jason Reed and Mark Menjivar and art historian Erina Duganne, have accepted this task in their current exhibition “Northern Triangle,” which is both an archive and an exhibition that works as a platform to problematize.

  The exhibition commences with a small timeline on a table that provides dates and descriptions of major events marking US foreign policy in Central America. Pulled collaboratively by

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  picks August 28, 2014

  Kate Newby

  Kate Newby’s latest solo exhibition features a modest and contemplative sculptural installation that playfully exploits the conventions of the physical gallery and extends her ongoing investigation of linking different spaces in nuanced ways. Two components of I feel like a truck on a wet highway, 2014, manifest this idea. The first is a sculpture of bulbous silver bells hanging in the gallery’s entryway. The bells have a precious quality, which is heightened by the artist’s subtle fingerprints on the metal. They are suspended individually by thin, multicolored strings, the other end of which

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  picks June 16, 2014

  Theo Michael

  Made of sensitive materials such as tape, cardboard, and clay, the majority of the work in Theo Michael’s latest solo exhibition, “Reptile Dialectics,” will not survive for posterity. However, this extinction allows for opportunities unique to their condition as well as allows the artist to produce a body of work simply for creation's sake.

  The exhibition is divided into two distinct galleries. In the first, a multitude of smaller sculptures sit on short pedestals made of Styrofoam, and are complemented by graphite drawings, paintings, and hanging sculptures—most of which have been defaced by

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  picks April 21, 2014

  John Zurier

  John Zurier’s latest exhibition brings together a collection of six paintings based on the artist’s recent travels to Iceland. Barely illuminated by the natural light in the gallery space, the Minimalistic works are quiet and contemplative, asking the viewer to soak in the ambiance of each painting in its setting. It is a meditative show that requires a commitment of time—throughout, the brushstrokes are nuanced, almost elusive, causing the works to begin to speak among one another in suggestive ways. The paintings are gestures of simplicity that balance lyricism and composition, and are as

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  picks March 16, 2014

  Mungo Thomson

  Mungo Thomson’s “Crickets for Solo and Ensemble” is a two-part musical movement that is divided by the physical parameters of the exhibition space, becoming an equal two-part show. Acting as a concerto in three spaces, the show explores the banal and commonplace sounds of crickets in nature.

  In collaboration with Los Angeles–based composer Michael Webster, the work includes sounds of crickets chirping in habitats all over the world that have been converted into a musical composition involving a seventeen-piece orchestra. The first part of the show, Cricket Solos, 2014, is located on the ground