GROUP EXHIBITION

Timothy Taylor, New York is pleased to present ILACIONES, a summer group exhibition organised by Danny Baez showcasing nine artists who are either from or influenced by Latin America, connected through their use of traditional techniques and materials informed by their cultural history. ‘Ilaciones’ is translated from Spanish as ‘nexus’ or ‘threads’, referencing the web of connections between the artists through a commonality of material, gesture, and idea.

Each artist’s implementation of material, personal discourse, and theory explores how the creative process is intertwined with manual work, while contextualising it within a historical dimension. The works deal closely with identity in an era defined by globalisation, collectively constituting a political discourse, reinvigorating the exertion and ritual process associated with each artist’s practice.

Eduardo Terrazas presents a work from the series ‘Possibilities of a Structure’, in which he employs techniques inspired by the Huichol people of Jalisco, Durango and Nayarit in Mexico, whereby coloured yarn is arranged into geometric forms on wax-covered boards. Claudia Peña Salinas’ practice similarly combines indigenous thought with modern and minimalist structures. Her hanging sculpture Titla uses natural fibres while at the same time relating to the symbols, colours, and materials used by pre-Columbian people. Luis Flores crotchets full-length, life-size figurative sculptures out of yarn, complicating the concept of masculinity through the use of materials and craft techniques traditionally associated with the feminine. Joiri Minaya’s work deploys clichés of tropical representation, using textiles to question the performance of tropical identity as cultural production. Jorge Eielson’s work addresses the physicality of material through traditional artisanal techniques of stretching and knotting the canvas. Engel Leonardo’s works engage with the cultural production of objects and the inherent psychological and sociological discourses implicit within them, presenting a tiled work inspired by pre-Columbian patterns grounded in geometry. Gerd Leufert’s work draws on his background in graphic design. The monochromatic, organic forms simultaneously allude to modernist abstraction and pre-Colombian figures; their symmetrical compositions also redolent of Rorschach tests. Claudia Martínez Garay’s work is in dialogue with the impact of colonialism on cultural artefacts, questioning their preservation, transformation and eventual circulation. Solange Pessoa’s sculptures make reference to her homeland of Brazil, both in tradition and in medium, often using soapstone from local quarries to carve biomorphic shapes representing both the body as well as ancestral landscapes. Her works evoke the metaphysical meaning of the first human tool.

This exhibition honours El Museo del Barrio’s 50^th anniversary and the important and pivotal role of Latinx cultural production in the United States.