N. Dash, Berenice Olmedo, ektor garcia, Huma Bhabha »Meaningful Disorders«

"Monsters are also natural, but they are seen as prodigies
against nature. Man admires nature and destroys it,
turns it into something artificial; monsters are the
product of a disorder of nature and to some extent
civilization disorganizes nature".

Margo Glantz

This exhibition brings together the work of four artists who explore the relationship between bodies, representation, and the gestures of greater or lesser scale through which these artists modify their materials. The project began with an invitation to N. Dash (Miami, Florida, 1980; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) to exhibit for the first time in Mexico; a group of additional artists was selected to reveal possible connections, juxtapositions, and shared meanings, including Berenice Olmedo (Oaxaca, Mexico, 1987; lives and works in Mexico City), ektor garcia (Red Bluff, California, 1985; has a nomadic practice in Mexico and the US), and Huma Bhabha (Karachi, Pakistan, 1962; lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York).

N. Dash's practice merges painting with sculpture, and is based on a deep connection to the earth and environmental flux. The works incorporate natural and industrial materials such as earth, paint, plastic bottles, agricultural nets, styrofoam strips, and discarded cardboard. Dash is interested in the mutability of materials and their history, both in terms of their geological past and the way they have been manipulated and transformed by humankind. For decades, Dash has created small sculptures out of scraps of fabric that are carried in hand and constantly rubbed, and transformed during the course of daily life. Eventually Dash determines that the piece of cloth can no longer be transfigured and photographs it, then prints it with silkscreen ink directly on the paintings’ prepared earth grounds. In this way, the work registers different types of corporeal and material transformation.

Berenice Olmedo’s sculptural practice is concerned with the way technology shapes human bodies, behavior, and social connections. Taking as a starting point that even walking upright is a form of technology, she explores the tools we use to relate to our environment and, ultimately, to mediate between life and death. Olmedo’s sculptures incorporate shapes derived from medical scans of illnesses or malformations and integrate protheses and medical devices in their composition. Through this, the artist challenges the notion of human wholeness and normalcy, and emphasizes the political dimensions of disability, illness, and care.

ektor garcia is a multidisciplinary artist who works in the interstices between sculpture, installation, and crochet, creating installations with an amalgamation of forms. His nomadic practice embraces activities that have traditionally been seen as women’s work, and performed either as hobbies or as a secondary form of income. In this way, garcia addresses issues such as the pain of queer experience, the effect of power structures on the intimate spaces of being, and the flexibility of gender roles. Through a wide range of experiments with craft techniques and materials, garcia has developed a language of his own with crochet—using either wool or copper wire—that he combines with ceramics, leather, metals, and found materials, many of organic origin.

Through sculpture, drawing, and photography, Huma Bhabha explores the tensions between time, the memory of home, displacement, war, and colonialism. She uses found materials and everyday objects such as polystyrene, clay, construction debris, and wire mesh to create totemic characters that oscillate between abstraction and human figuration. The figures she creates tend towards the monstrous and grotesque, not only as a form of provocation, but as an exploration of the otherworldly and of forms of alterity. Her work has a wide range of references, from science fiction to archaeological ruins to Roman antiquities and African sculpture, transcending a particular time and place.