Hunter MFASO

INEQUALITY REEXAMINED. SCULPTURE BY ABRAHAM CRUZVILLEGAS ACE Curatorial Collective, Hunter College Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery South-West Corner 68th St. and Lexington Ave. One view June 25, 2010 – September 4, 2010 24/7

“They have skate boards as a base.

None of the wooden pieces is attached, screwed or glued, they’re just in equilibrium.

Please find skate boards randomly, they must be ordinary things;

then find the potato, ginger and/or chayote randomly as well.”

The ACE curatorial collective of Hunter College presents Inequality Reexamined. Summer 2010, an exhibition of sculptures by the Mexico City-based artist Abraham Cruzvillegas. The project was conceived and is being created specifically for the street-facing windows of the Leubsdorf Gallery and the hot New York summer.

The sculptures in the window vitrine visualize and embrace the process of perishing. With them, Cruzvillegas explores the issues of transformation, self-construction, and the unfinished, open-ended nature of artwork and material objects. Complicating the viewers’ expectations, the sculptures will open different meanings of perishing and decay with an unusual, life-affirming, metamorphosis. Day one will differ from day two, which will differ from day sixty, and by the end of August the viewers will encounter a changed object.

The sculptures, composed of materials found randomly in different boroughs of New York City, absorb and express the rhythm of the street and people’s quotidian ways. By providing a set of simple instructions for assembling his work, Cruzvillegas emphasizes its constructed nature and dissolves its boundaries into the processes of scavenging, street-walking, and errand-running. Sticks, potatoes, skateboards, summer, heat, the virtuosity of equilibrium, and the intrigue of metamorphosis all reside in this project.

Abraham Cruzvillegas was born in Mexico City in 1968. He studied pedagogy at UNAM and participated in Gabriel Orozco’s workshop in 1987 – 1991. Since 1987, Cruzvillegas has exhibited internationally in such shows as the 25th Sao Paulo Biennale in 2002, 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, and Cali Biennale in Colombia in 2008. Since the 1990s, he has tutored, taught, and participated in conferences and workshops. In 2009, he held residency at the Wattis Institute of California College for the Arts in San Francisco. He is a recipient of numerous awards and scholarships, such as 2010 – 2011 DAAD in Berlin. His recent work includes autoconstrucción: The Film, which he presented at the Red Cat Arts Center in Los Angeles in 2009 and Kurimanzutto gallery in May, 2010, as a multi-media collaborative performance. Cruzvillegas is represented by the Kurimanzutto Gallery, Mexico City.

For more information, please contact ACE: apantuye@hunter.cuny.edu