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Soho20Chelsea Gallery
presents
Mariángeles Soto-Díaz: The Utopian Tense
of Green
February
2 - February 27, 2010
Mariángeles Soto-Díaz: The Utopian Tense of
Green
Installation view
Paintings on sustainable wood
and linen, drawings on Duralar, vinyl,
Astroturf
Soho20Chelsea Gallery is
pleased to present Mariángeles Soto-Díaz's
second solo exhibition in our Gallery II, The Utopian
Tense of Green.
Soto-Díaz unsettles the autonomy of painting by probing
its 'limiting conditions' in a critique of abstract painting's
self-referential position. Both conceptually and formally, her
work engages the legacies of modernism and their failed
utopias. A native of the oil-producing country of Venezuela,
Soto-Díaz subsumes the modernist promise and reinscribes its
formal referents with a new set of meanings. The Utopian
Tense of Green is an installation with a series of
abstract paintings and drawings on linen, sustainable wood
panels and duralar. Based on preliminary sketches made on the
computer, her exacting process is enlivened by an organic
sense of motion, broken symmetries and open
fields.
Mariángeles Soto-Díaz, Color it Green (wall drawing
on left)
Vinyl, Astroturf, painting
Mariángeles Soto-Díaz, Color it Green
(detail)
Vinyl, Astroturf, painting
Soto-Díaz owes her love for color and hard-edge
geometry to her graduate studies with West coast
abstractionist Karl Benjamin as well as early exposure to
Venezuelan colorists Cruz-Diez and Jesús Soto. She holds an MA
from CalArts and an MFA from Claremont Graduate University.
She lives and works near Los Angeles.
Mariángeles Soto-Díaz
Mariángeles Soto-Díaz: The Utopian Tense of Green
#1 (detail)
Painting on sustainable wood
Aphrodite Désirée Navab: She Speaks Greek
Farsi
February
2 - February 27, 2010
Soho20 Chelsea and ICC Athens are pleased to announce
an exhibition of new work by Aphrodite Désirée Navab (b. 1971,
Iran). She Speaks Greek Farsi. In this
photographic performance series, Navab’s abdomen serves as the
site of performing language. An expression in Greek, to speak
any language in a “Farsi way”, is a comment on how fluent and
well someone speaks that language. So to speak “Greek Farsi”
or “English Farsi” is to speak Greek or English well. By
implication and inspiration, if such a compliment exists today
(despite the ancient history of war between the Greeks and the
Persians), then other similar signs of respect between
antagonistic nations might be possible.
Aphrodite Désirée Navab
Navab is
an artist from Iran based in New York City. She holds a
doctorate in Art and Art Education from Columbia University
(2004), and a BA magna cum laude in Visual and Environmental
Studies from Harvard University (1993). The world premiere of
her solo show, She Speaks Greek Farsi was sponsored
by ICCA and was exhibited in Athens, Greece: (Sep.-Oct. 2009).
Navab was included in the exhibition and book, Through the
Lens: Photography from the Permanent Collection, at the
Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami, which features only 100
significant photographs from more than 1000 photographic
holdings: from Julia Margaret Cameron and Walker Evans to
Cindy Sherman and Gregory Crewdson.
Aphrodite Désirée
Navab
ICC
Athens is a non-profit organization established in Athens and
active in largescale workspace architectural research,
assessment and design management in Europe and the US. With
access to a variety of spaces in Athens, ICCA engages in
experimental work producing related projects such as
exhibitions, choreographies, research and educational
programs, competitions, etc.
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