Montserrat Albores Gleason

  • picks February 28, 2011

    Claire Fontaine

    For their exhibition “Arando el mar” (Ploughing the Sea), the Paris-based collective Claire Fontaine lowered the ceiling of this gallery, and on it, they wrote a fragment of text from Lidia Falcón’s book Letters to a Spanish Idiot (1974) with the smoke from a candle. The piece, Untitled (como si hubiese arado en el agua . . . ) (Untitled [as if it had plowed into the water . . . ]), 2011, offers something of an inventory, a description of the number of times that a housewife set and cleared a table for meals during a ten-year period. According to the text, each setting took seven trips to the

  • picks January 14, 2011

    Jorge Méndez Blake

    For this exhibition, curator Daniela Pérez invited artist Jorge Méndez Blake to reinterpret the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo’s collection. Because of the close connection between literature and Méndez Blake’s work, his point of departure was Rufino Tamayo’s book collection. In recent years, Méndez Blake has focused on the phenomenon of the library, and this show is no exception: The wealth of books belonging to Tamayo, a painter from Oaxaca and the museum’s namesake, are reconfigured in the show to convey the idea of a library as thought rendered in architectural form. Shelves of books, some

  • picks August 30, 2010

    “Today I Feel Well”

    This exhibition borrows its title from the microstory “Fecundidad” (Fertility), by writer Augusto Monterroso, and includes works by François Bucher, José León Cerrillo, Mario García Torres, Christian Jankowski, and the Tercerunquinto collective. In its entirety, “Fecundidad” reads: “Today I feel well, like a Balzac; I am finishing this line.” Monterroso’s story speaks of the act of writing as well as its history, just as the works in this show reflect on the construction of artwork and the process of perception. Captura holográfica. Tepoztlán (Holographic Capture. Tepoztlán), 2010, a work by

  • picks March 20, 2010

    Pedro Reyes

    Pedro Reyes first conceived of a television series that would feature puppets of Karl Marx and philosopher Adam Smith in 2007. It was not until the next year, however, when Akiko Miyake, the cocurator of the third Yokohama Triennale, put him in touch with Japanese master puppet maker Takumi Ota, that Reyes was able to move forward with the project. Through elaborate drawings, Reyes designed twelve puppets for Ota to create, after which he began to work on a trailer and the pilot episode of Babymarx, 2009, in collaboration with producer Moisés Cosío, the founder Detalle Films. This exhibition

  • interviews March 17, 2010

    Abraham Cruzvillegas

    Abraham Cruzvillegas, known for using handmade and found objects in his sculptures, inaugurated La Galería de Comercio last month in Mexico City. This nonprofit temporary “street space” will present several one-evening events over the course of this year, which will be documented on a blog. Here Cruzvillegas discusses the project and his focus on public space and collaboration.

    I DECIDED TO CREATE La Galería de Comercio to answer a personal question: I wanted to know what was going on in Mexico City after a few years of being away. Its name is based on where it is located––on the northeast corner