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May we suggest

Reviews / May 30, 2013

Juan Ortiz-Apuy Downsizes Global Cultural Capital in Montreal

Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Montreal March 20 to April 27, 2013

In the preparatory notes for his recent exhibition “Waiting for the Barbarians (The Realia Series)” at Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Costa Rica–born, Montreal-based artist Juan Ortiz-Apuy describes his work as “a study of globalization through a series of tropes and motifs.” This elusive statement suggests that things are not always what they seem in the objects and photographs he presents, complicating the often simple-looking works with the baggage of global economic forces.

Ortiz-Apuy’s work seems an attempt to translate globalization to a human scale through analogy, improvised educational tools and art historical references, making tangible the effects of a system too large to comprehend as a whole. These often-salient observations are carried out with a wry sense of humor; each of Ortiz-Apuy’s off-kilter attempts to simplify systems and symptoms of globalization is executed with a playfulness that gives way to self-reflexive gravity.

The tropes of globalization Ortiz-Apuy identifies and explores are inflation (simultaneously as material tension, economic strain and a sculptural activity), the circulation of goods, money and people (positing capital and goods as the new cosmopolitan citizens), and measures of distance (borders, separation and security). These overlapping themes weave a portrait of globalization as a form of imperialism through economic means.

Gallery visitors were greeted with a red carpet bearing Ortiz-Apuy’s tripartite, mock-corporate branding initiative. “Realia” appears across the top, a double-edged word that stands for the objects and artifacts that serve as classroom teaching aids and for culturally specific terms (usually nouns) that have no close equivalent in translation. In both cases the word signifies an interest in the relationship between language and objects.

The next symbol of Ortiz-Apuy’s “brand” is the ancient symbol Ouroboros—a snake eating its own tail—an emblem of cyclicality, self-reflexivity, and a perpetual balance of death and rebirth.

The final component of the design is a trillium-like formation of rounded triangles set in a three-circle Venn diagram. Here, regions of overlap can be seen either as points of agreement or sites of negotiation and possible conflict.

A second red carpet led visitors to American Tourister, a three-piece vintage luggage set arranged on the gallery floor. The suitcases all breathe subtly; their sides slowly expand and contract in relation to the viewer’s presence. The air of mystery exuded from these suspicious packages is heightened by each being slightly open—a facet which suggests both a living presence and an active dimension in the circulation of goods.

Two of the gallery walls were lined with photographs of interventions and temporary sculptures executed with everyday objects. Lovers I (for AB) depicts two interconnected padlocks, while Measures of Distance I (or Hay diez centimetros de silencio entre tus manos y mis manos)—the parenthetical title roughly translates as “to how many centimeters of silence between your hands and my hands”—shows a crumpled measuring tape apparently pressed between two hands.

In both works Ortiz-Apuy misuses tools to illustrate ideas of security and trust, exploring alienation and the breakdown of intersubjectivity that stem from the need to define borders and protect ourselves.

Another photograph, Quntillzos (Quintuplets), shows a cluster of five Chiquita bananas. Each banana’s product label cites a different country of origin, tracing the seemingly homogeneous fruit from Costa Rica, Panama, Columbia, Honduras and Guatemala. This subtle work is both a testament to the scale of the American company’s empire in Latin America and a reflection on the imposition of boundaries; it is likely that these bananas and the capital they represent circulate more freely than many people do.

Alongside the photographic work is Lost in Translation I (or into thin air!) a paper-trail chronicling both an action performed by the artist and the surreptitious movement and instability of capital. The work consists of nine receipts framed together that fragmentarily recount Ortiz-Apuy bringing $16.70 to a currency converter and converting it nine times; upon returning it to Canadian dollars it had mysteriously become $1.03.

In the center of the gallery space is the large work And I can liken you to a table, a door, a shadow, a revisioned Sol LeWitt structure-cum-sales kiosk, its open and closed cube forms acting like a mutable retail display containing smaller component artworks.

This work, as well as the exhibition in general references J.M. Coetzee’s 1980 novel “Waiting for the Barbarians,” the story of a Magistrate at a small outpost community coming to question the violent imperialism he represents, eventually being tortured and imprisoned for his sympathies—and a brief romance ending in rejection—with the enemies of his empire.

On one of And I can liken you…’s flat surfaces sits Crayola de Doble Filo (doble filo translates as “double-edged”), a case of pink chalk carved into the shape of bullets. The disarming bubblegum-pink colour makes the potential for militarism in one of the most basic pedagogic tools all the more disturbing.

Lovers III (The Magistrate and the Barbarian Girl), a sculpture made from doorknobs on either side of a Plexiglas panel, ruptures the work’s planar surface by descending through one of the structure’s platforms. The doorknobs have locking mechanisms though neither has a keyhole, making a strange equilibrium or stand-off between the two sides, and positing devices meant to ensure security directly in opposition to communication.

Hanging at the far end of And I can liken you… the silkscreened t-shirt Inflation II (How to Make a Sculpture) bears a set of instructions, suggesting that filling one’s lungs with air and collectively holding our breath is a productive sculptural exercise. The t-shirt also has geometric shapes illustrating the expansion and contraction of a form, making clear visual links with American Tourister and other inflation-focused works.

Ortiz-Apuy was perhaps most inventive with his use of the gallery as a framing device in Lovers II (Kenmore & Hunter), Lost in Translation II (or “sculpture is made with two instruments, some supports and pretty air), which at first seemed an anomalously placed dehumidifier, which caused momentary uncertainty in the viewer and provoked the dreaded question “is it art?” The work is in actuality a humidifier and dehumidifier modified to share both a tank and power supply, creating a make-work relationship that straddles humour and the poetic, a Sisyphean situation where something is always lost in the exchange. This interplay of sculpture and/as air creates an intersection of the material and immaterial, the tangible and intangible, making a microcosm of uninterrupted circulation.

The exhibition not only appropriates design aesthetics and minimalist forms, but much of the authority and directness that is attached to them. Beyond serving as simultaneous critique and homage to these forms, in borrowing their assumed legibility each artwork becomes an intentionally naïve realia floundering in its attempt to bring globalization into an immediate relationship to the body. The works improbably conjure both the playful precariousness of Gabriel Orozco and the corporate slickness of Liam Gillick. The at times overwhelming web of intertextuality in the show creates an archaic circular logic which dashes through literature, philosophy, theology and art history creating an omnipresent globalization burlesque. Indeed, Ortiz-Apuy’s vinyl wall work could not be more fitting: it reads, “a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere,” phraseology generally reserved for the presence of a Christian God, but in this case certainly referring to the inescapable forces of globalization.