Artists: Tomás Díaz Cedeño, ektor garcia, Gordon Hall, Rodrigo Hernández, Ana Mazzei, Berenice Olmedo, Federico Pérez Villoro, SITES, Tezontle
Exhibition title: El ensamble del ocaso
Organized by: Ana Pérez Escoto and PEANA
Venue: Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey (MARCO), Monterrey, Mexico
Date: March 24 – August 14, 2022
Photography: Daniela Villareal, Images courtesy of PEANA & MARCO
Because of the wide sky and lack of tall objects, I become quickly aware of any visitors in the Yard. I spot their figures even if they are far in the distance and only small shapes moving among the rows. But visitors aren’t frequent, and when I hear human voices, they most often belong to the yardmen calling each other.
Klara and The Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
El ensamble del ocaso [ The Sunset Ensemble ] is an exhibition organized by Ana Pérez Escoto and PEANA for the Sculpture Patio at MARCO. The show places the work of artists Ana Mazzei, Berenice Olmedo, ektor garcia, Federico Pérez Villoro, Gordon Hall, Rodrigo Hernández, Sites, Tezontle, and Tomás Díaz Cedeño at a crossroad of common temporal and spatial conditions. Enclosed by the museum’s outer walls and allocated under open skies over the Patio’s stone carpets, this exhibition summons a grid of signs related to the landscape’s structures, as well as to the position and balance of the discrete energies traversing it. These directions activate and deactivate through fields, or stations—places not exactly inhabited, but not impersonal either, that we will use to encounter each artist and their subtle or sharp material transformations for this particular region of the museum.
As a result of its exterior condition, the exhibition is put into proximity with the central blocks of the city of Monterrey and, to the east, under the lines of one of the city’s most important mountains and natural monuments. El ensamble del ocaso [ The Sunset Ensemble ] shares its phenomena with this same eastern sun and its movement as the day passes, sharpening the architectural shadows that resonate through several works. This magnetic environment has also facilitated the infiltration of a context and a life for these structures. Indications of materials and societies whose operations take place in diverse temporalities: structures for stillness and repose, but also for memory and storytelling: structures that emit signals and symbols, but also those that accept the body, making it go through histories that are both intimately personal and anonymously institutional. El ensamble del ocaso [ The Sunset Ensemble ] appraises these structures and their functions in a shared territory. Appearing as a river whose bed has dried, the Sculpture Patio reveals to us instruments, vessels, and emitters that are now visible: works that speculate with an energy whose availability is uncertain but capable of influencing, from a deliberately ambiguous moment in time, the imagination of our surroundings.
-Christian Camacho
