Marcela Pardo Ariza / Conrad Guevara
Burn Notice
March 10 – April 7, 2018
Opening Reception: March 10, 2-5pm
Essay by Ángel Raphael Vásquez-Concepción
In the joint exhibition titled Burn Notice, the works by artist Marcela Pardo Ariza appropriate and analyze the forms of still lifes by painter Fernando Botero. The photographic prints by Pardo Ariza, are a pastiche that elaborates on the work by the Latin American Master. Pardo Ariza presents Botero’s burly fruits as discernible, juxtaposed fiery forms; a departure from the original purpose of offering a voyeuristic gaze of a grouping of tangible objects, and his superfluous critique of the privileges of the upper classes in his native Colombia.
In Pardo Ariza’s photographs, she appears to “harness” the calamitous power of fire; each of the works exhibited was composed by pasting together a variety of combustion stock photography. By suggestively detouring the evaluative, traditional paintings by Botero to convey her brand of satirical humor, Pardo Ariza eloquently queers the genre of still lifes, as well as the work and sociopolitical critique issued by him.
In connection, the whimsical mobiles by artist Conrad Guevara oscillate, like some post-apocalyptic orchids, between the mundane and the elegant. Made of a variety of brightly colored household items and painted surfaces, as well as other vernacular objects intentionally selected by the artist, each assemblage invokes both suspension and suspense -because of the hovering forms, and because of their apparent fragility as teetering expressions.
While each work by Guevara in Burn Notice is undoubtedly a sculpture, each is also a drawing and a painting, swaying and sprawling across the gallery space. The works are not still, aesthetically or politically. Like the work of artists associated with the Arte Povera movement in Italy, one could argue that the sculptures by Guevara contrast with the typical bourgeois minimalism related to contemporary capitalism and the field of technology, so pervasive in the Bay Area. Each work by Guevara is a fecund, sophisticated mashup of cultural and temporal references, banking on his personal multicultural experience and skills as a colorist.
Á.R. Vázquez-Concepción
Independent Curator
Marcela Pardo Ariza (b. 1991 Bogotá, Colombia) lives and works in San Francisco, CA. Ariza is the recipient of the Tosa Studio Award and a Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award from the San Francisco Foundation for the Arts. Her work has been recently exhibited at R/SF Projects (San Francisco), Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco, CA); De:Formal Gallery (New York, NY); Alter Space (San Francisco, CA); Guerrero Gallery (San Francisco, CA) and ProArts (Oakland, CA). Ariza works in the Programs and Pedagogy department at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and is a current member of the Curatorial Council at Southern Exposure.
Conrad Guevara (b. 1986) lives in Albany, CA. solo exhibitions include Kayrock, Brooklyn and City Limits, Oakland. Recent group exhibitions include Lane Meyer Projects, Denver; Levy Art and Architecture, SF; Material Art Fair, Mexico City and 1599 Tennessee, SF. Conrad is also one third of Bonanza with L. Williams and L. Tully with exhibitions at Interface Gallery, Oakland; di Rosa, Napa; Southern Exposure, SF and Recology Artist-in-Residence program, SF (forthcoming).
