Tania Pérez Córdova
Tania Pérez Córdova
Generalization
01 OCT 2022 - 23 FEB 2023
Curated by Humberto Moro, Deputy Director of Program, Dia Art Foundation.
Curated by Humberto Moro, Deputy Director of Program, Dia Art Foundation.
→ Galleries 1 and 2
¡HOY!
Generalization is the first solo exhibition of artist Tania Pérez Córdova (Mexico City, 1979) in a national institution, featuring a selection of pieces made over the past ten years, as well as objects specially commissioned for this occasion. The exhibition presents a reading of Pérez Córdova’s work through issues that she herself has addressed: the passage of time, the nature of materials, the gaze of the other, the imminence or possibility of an action, the way in which we assign value to objects, negative space, and more recently, the insufficiency of discourse.
Using primarily materials that are historically related to sculptural practices— like metal, ceramics, plaster, glass and marble—her work interacts with everyday objects such as clothing, jewelry, cigarettes, or contact lenses, all of which bear an intimate relationship with the human body. Alongside Pérez Córdova’s sculptural work, Generalization presents a program of barely perceptible performative actions that occur randomly within the galleries, creating relationships between action and object, where speculation and possibility are the gravitational center of the action. One of the horizontal axes that intersects all of the artist’s production is the idea that objects are nothing more than events occurring in other temporalities and scales— things don’t exist but happen. Following this frame of thought, geological time, the neighbor’s mind, or the microscopic world, become variables in her artistic work.
Conceptual in nature, Pérez Córdova’s sculptural practice offers compositions and dynamics which poetically point to places that exceed the objects themselves and the space that hosts them. Beyond the paraphrasing of known narratives, the enigmatic objects created by the artist reveal the potential of less prescribed narratives, ones that are open and that don’t determine the experience of the viewer. On the contrary, these narratives allow for the possibility of a story to have personal and profound implications for onlookers, while at the same time allowing them the possibility of imagining what happens outside their own experience: an oscillation between specificity and generalization.
Cerámica esmaltada y mujer que viste un vestido ocasionalmente
Cortesía de la artista y Tina Kim Gallery
The relationship between the unknown and the accidental plays an important role in Pérez Córdova’s work. Through a series of chance en- counters, the artist reproduced the pattern of an unknown woman’s dress on the surface of a large ceramic vase. A person wearing this dress occasionally walks through the gallery space, sparking a dialogue between the object and its double. The possibility of this encounter is as essential to the piece as the encounter itself. The sculpture functions as a prelude to an event occurring at any moment; a déjà vu, a distant memory or a premonition.
Impresión de una serie de agujeros, tierra, plantas, raíces, yeso, malla y pintura de esmalte
Cortesía de la artista y Tina Kim Gallery
Short Sight Box, 2020 traces the relationship between the gesture of carving a hole in the dirt, and the mark it creates in the landscape. The artist made a series of molds from the holes she carved in a plot of land, and which subsequently she turned into sculptural bodies. These residual elements resulting from the artist’s body’s interaction and space, describe a constellation in which the vacuum originated in subtraction acquires a visible shape.
01:34 pm, 2022
Vidrio estratificado con migajas de pan, insectos muertos encontrados, envolturas, pelusa, cáscaras de fruta y materiales diversos
Cortesía de la artista
Obra comisionada por el Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo
Time is a factor that the artist has continuously studied: the way in which it is measured, the way it is experienced, and how this experience is dis- similar and contingent on the factors that correlate with a given idea of time. In 1:33 pm, and 1:34 pm, 2022, the artist uses glass to encapsulate a constel- lation of residual, found, organic objects, like banana peels, notes, candy wrappers, receipts, lint, dead found insects, breadcrumbs, etc. The narrative relationships that appear between these objects form a painterly compo- sition. In this sense, the composition can be seen as a diptych, showing the difference between one minute and another.
These bronze contours function like echoes of personal and collective memories that the artist has been collecting throughout the years. Their shapes are drawn directly into casting sand and their final form recording each spill of the material. With titles such as That Business Went Bankrupt, 2022, and Memory of a Room, 2022, this series reflects on the relationship between inside and outside, public and private space, and engages the viewer’s gaze by activating new narrative relationships through architectural details that are both ambivalent and ordinary.
Concreto, hielo derritiéndose, acero al carbono y materiales diversos
Cortesía de la artista
Obra comisionada por el Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo
Pérez Córdova is interested in tracing relations between discourse and matter, where liquids are a metaphor for the way in which things acquire a certain shape. In the installation All Our Explanations, 2022 the artist makes a series of casts from human heads - all of them coming from anonymous 3D models from an online bank -, which she then fills with water which then gets frozen. The newly revealed negative spaces embody a repository of the mind. At the same time, the sound of the drops are yet another way to count time.
In A 5200 Word Speech, 2022 the artist uses a liquid material, in this case artificial saliva, as a metaphor of the production of speech, and a material agent with the ability to represent a given situation.
Mármol, lentes de contacto cosméticos con graduaciones personalizadas y una o varias personas que portan un lente de contacto de un color diferente al de sus ojos
Cortesía de la artista
Obra comisionada por el Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo
Contact lenses have been an allegorical element present in much of the artist’s work and they suggest, on the one hand, that an object can sharpen the gaze, and on the other, that the object itself can have a specificity related to whom wears it — in this case, in terms of the color and prescription of the contacts. By letting the lenses suspended in a liquid solution in cavities within a marble surface, the artist generates a multiplicity of points of view which coexist in a sculptural space. The work is completed with the en- counter of the other’s gaze, when discovering some of the viewers in the show wearing one contact lens different to their own eye color and com- plementary to the ones on view.
Cobre y 5200 gotas de saliva artificial
Cortesía de la artista
Obra comisionada por el Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo
In A 5200 Word Speech, 2022 the artist uses a liquid material, in this case artificial saliva, as a metaphor of the production of speech, and a material agent with the ability to represent a given situation.
Aluminio, plumas de pájaro, arcilla y materiales diversos (fragmento de una reja fundida y vaciada en su propio molde)
Cortesía de la artista y Galerie Martin Janda.
In the series Objects Into Themselves, the artist took on the task of making objects while somehow undoing them. It all started with a brass trumpet Pérez Córdova bought from a man playing for spare change in the street. She first produced a mold of the object, then cut the trumpet into pieces, melted it and poured it back into its own mold. The result was un- settling, described in her own words as “an object that somehow remained the same while being something entirely different.” This series continued with other metallic objects made of a single material, like a corrugated piece of roof (A Roof Into a Roof, 2018) and fragments of metal fences (A Fence into a Fence 1, A Fence into a Fence 2, A Fence into a Fence 3, A Fence into a Fence 4, 2022). As a version of their own previous forms, all these objects became poetic agents, maps of everything that is lost or modified in the process of being reconstituted – a whole process leading towards a dis- appearance, undoing while doing.
Ventilador de techo modificado
Cortesía de la artista
Obra comisionada por el Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo
10 Minute Spin, 2014/2022, is a work inspired by the figure of the met- ronome—the device used to maintain a rhythm in music, which can adapt to different tempos—the artist intervenes an everyday object, a fan, to delay the time in which it spins. Beyond canceling its function, Pérez Córdova considers this object as an intervention in space, which has the capacity to insert one value of time into another.
Like most of Pérez Córdova’s work, this series started from a daily situa- tion which evolved into a production methodology. The artist decided to take off all the windows of her studio and brought them to a glass workshop where she folded each one into a sculpture. The narratives embedded in the material – its history, provenance and location – together with the un- predictability in the production process ended up being as important as the final objects she created. The uncertainty embedded in the process of folding glass pushed Pérez Córdova to think of shapes in relation to the most basic mix of gravity, weight and time, rather than taste. These final sculptures are often placed in dialogue with other elements – a broken bracelet, a soapy liquid, a burning incense – creating through their interaction a narrative microcosm. Through the years this series developed into institutional com- missions in which museum’s windows were transformed into sculptures, literally translating the architectonic feature of an art institution into its object of display.
The Tamayo Museum appreciates the support of the BBVA Mexico Foundation to carry out this exhibition.
