Enrique Chagoya - Untitled (After Edward Curtis), 2016
Etching with acrylic; 17 x 23.75 inches (paper size 22 x 29.75 inches). Edition of 12
Bay Area friends -- be sure to see "Postcolonial Contemporary" at San Francisco's
Incline Gallery this weekend. The show will come down on
Monday, July 11.
Curated by
John Zarobell, "Postcolonial Contemporary" features thought-provoking work by artists including
Lewis deSoto and
Enrique Chagoya, whose
Untitled (After Edward Curtis) (2016) was published by Magnolia Editions.
Genevieve Quick of
Temporary Art Review writes:
In Enrique Chagoya’s Untitled (After Edward Curtis) (2016), the artist inserts a billboard featuring an Apple iPad Mini and the all-seeing eye of the American dollar in the expansive and unspoiled Western landscape of Edward Curtis’s An Oasis in the Badlands (1905). The West and the American West, specifically the Bay Area, are places where money and corporate interests saturate the visual and physical landscape. Famously, Curtis attempted to capture an “authentic” picture of the “vanishing” Native American Indians, which was a somewhat problematically conceived and executed enterprise. Chagoya also includes a small, shadowy figure leaping across a small pool of water, a reference to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Behind the Gare St. Lazare (1932). Cartier-Bresson’s image embodies what the photographer termed the “decisive moment,” the creative point when a photographer acts upon the world to frieze a moment, rendering it magical. In juxtaposing Curtis and Cartier-Bresson, Chagoya presents two photographic paradigms: one where the photographer is in search of a specific picture and the other that waits for the world to unfold and operates on the serendipity of life. Chagoya almost poses the question about how we intervene on a world where corporate interests threaten the stability of place for those less powerful, when is the “decisive moment”?
Read the whole review
here, and check out
Incline Gallery's website for visiting information: the gallery is open 1-6 pm this weekend.
More art by Lewis deSoto from Magnolia Editions
More art by Enrique Chagoya from Magnolia Editions
