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Rebeca Méndez
At
Any Given Moment, Fall 1 with Volcanic Rock,
2009
Video
art installation: Single channel HD video (16mm film
transfer). Size: 22.5 x 18 feet. Continuous loop.
4 tons
of volcanic lava rock in an area of 22.5 x 18
feet.
Sound by
Drew Schnurr.
Currently in exhibition at the Alyce Williamson Gallery
in Pasadena, California, through January 16, 2011
Rebeca Méndez was born and raised in
Mexico City and received her MFA from Art Center College of
Design. She is currently a professor in the department of
Design | Media Arts at UCLA.
Méndez’s art practice is in various media—photography,
16mm film, video, and installation—with which she explores the
nature of perception and media representation, specifically
how cultures express themselves through the style of nature
that they produce at a given time and the medium through which
they construct this nature. She moves through different scales
with ease—from photographic prints, to immersive sound and
video installations, to murals of more than 25,000 square
feet, to installations involving sixty-foot boulders and tons
of lava rock. She considers the journey as a medium in itself
and has produced a significant body of work based on travels
to unfamiliar and extreme places such as Iceland, Patagonia,
Svalbard archipelago in the high arctic, and the Sahara, where
she is awakened to a heightened level of
perception.
Méndez’s interest in the nature of matter—in cycles and
systems, specifically the forces and cross-rhythmic tensions
that make natural phenomena emerge—stem from her growing up in
two seemingly entropic environments, Mexico City and the
Mexican jungle, where she would follow her father in pursuit
of Mayan archaeology. Common to both environments is
hypercomplexity, multiplicity, and constant change. Méndez’s
move to Los Angeles and her expeditions to geologically young
Iceland and the severe high arctic have furthered this
impetus.
Exhibitions: ARCO Madrid 29th
International Art Fair; X Biennial, Cuenca, Ecuador; the
National Design Triennial; SFMOMA; the Beall Center for Art
and Technology, Irvine; the Broad Art Center, Los Angeles; and
the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Collections:
Stedelijk Museum, SFMOMA; Cooper-Hewitt, National Design
Museum, Denver Art Museum; Freitag Historical Museum,
Hannover; and Museo José Luís Cuevas, Mexico City.
Reviews: Los Angeles Times, Eye
Magazine, Metropolis, El Pais, and
I.D. magazine. Awards: Artist
residencies: Gunnar Gunnarson Institute, Iceland; The Arctic
Circle, Svalbard, Norway; Suomenlinna Artist Residency,
Suomenlinna, Helsinki. 2010 California Community Foundation
Mid Career Fellowship for Visual Artist and was selected for
the Artist Pension Trust, México City.
Rebeca Méndez, Los
Angeles
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