Where You Left Off

Juan Carlos León lives and works between Mexico City and Quito. His practice is defined by a constant hybrid identity. On the one hand, he explores the development of landscapes built from sensitive data visualization through generating electronic and automatized sculptures and installations that derive from experimental processes of scientific research. On the other, he constantly works with materials such as petroleum, water, fungus, and extracts from medicinal plants—whose rich physical and symbolical qualities also exude economical, religious, mythological and cultural connotations. In his work, he is interested in the ways technological advancements have given humans the illusion of power over nature.

He is currently experimenting with a variety of collaborations happening between human and natural elements—in which the design of a controlled environment can eventually lead to an organic process—there where nature and culture, as well as arts and sciences, are on an ongoing dialogue.

Aurora Noreña conceives sculpture as the container of all her practice and the place where painting, video, creative writing and multidisciplinary projects take place. She studied architecture and holds an MA in visual arts but considers that it was during her years as a teacher in high art education, where she found the necessary elements to implement her creative strategies, alongside her inclination to develop social projects with symbolic resources.

By 2016, the Mesoamerican cultures become her main focus, and sought within “horizons of incomprehensibility” (artist’s expression) resources to fabulate around memory and to explore the agency that objects from the past have to intervene in our lives. Her latest sculptures, Tepalcates, bring back to our imaginary objects made invisible by the illegal trafficking of cultural heritage. With novel techniques and suggestive formal explorations, she grants these objects a new life and carries out a symbolic restitution bringing them back to us in this new frame.

María makes an artistic practice of witchcraft, trusts in the symbolic relationships that emerge from the divination reading, and enunciates them. She works with the materiality of historical, magical and personal archives, mainly with the inquisitorial sources that mention women named Maria Mendez (S. XVII) between COL and MEX, she convinced herself that they share something more than her name.

Her projects are long-winded, the process is abundant, in itself, they are a result traversed by everyday life and motherhood. She is interested in the table as a body that supports the processes, food and community. Since 2012, she makes use of the kitchen as a meeting place for creation and she has been invited to cook with women from the insular zone and the Magdalena River in Colombia, Puebla, and Mexico City.

She has shown her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bogotá, the Museum of Modern Art in Cartagena de Indias, the Archaeological Museum of Galapa Atlántico, the Municipal House of La Boquilla in the insular area of ​​Cartagena de Indias, the Banco de la República Museum in Montería, and the Zenu Indigenous Museum, the Manuel Huertas Vergara Sincelejo and Pereira Art Museum. In addition, she has participated in artistic residencies in the Argentine Northwest, Puebla Mexico and the Atlantic Colombia and her work is part of the collection of the MAMC Museum of Modern Art in Cartagena de Indias.

Chantal Peñalosa (Tecate, Baja California, Mexico) studied visual arts at the Autonomous University of Baja California and the University of São Paulo.

She won the acquisition prize at the XIV Bienal de Artes Visuales del Noroeste and was a FONCA fellow in the Young Artists category (2013-2014; 2015-2016 and 2020-2021). In 2014 she was also a beneficiary of the Bancomer-MACG Program in its 4th edition.

Her work has been shown in institutions such as MUAC (2022), Museo Jumex 2021, Mexico; Carrillo Gil Museum of Art, 2021; M HKA Museum, Belgium, 2019; ESPAC, Mexico, 2019; XII FEMSA Biennial, Mexico, 2018; Amparo Museum, Mexico, 2018; CCI Fabrika, Russia, 2017, La Tallera, Mexico, 2015; ZKM Center for Art and Media, Germany, 2015, MUAC, Mexico, 2014, among others. She received the acquisition prize at the XIV Bienal de Artes Visuales del Noroeste and has been part of FONCA in the Young Artists category (2013-2014, 2015-2016, 2020-2021). In 2014 she was part of the Bancomer-MACG Program in its 4th edition.

Departing from a poetic language and presenting an autobiographical tone, she establishes dialogues and negotiations with phenomena such as: waiting, and the unnoticed and the passage of time, where it is possible to glimpse political and social aspects. More recently, she has developed projects related to passages in the history of art and literature that have been omitted, forgotten or rejected.

Alexis Granwell investigates the potential of pulp to record touch and create intimacy, exploring the psychological and bodily characteristics of our built and natural environments. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, and she has participated in exhibitions at The American University Art Museum at The Katzen Art Center, Washington DC; Schau Fenster, Berlin, Germany; BravinLee, New York, NY; Underdonk, New York, NY; Field Projects, New York, NY; Ortega y Gasset, New York, NY; Fleisher/ Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Fjord Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; Mana Contemporary, Chicago, IL; Tiger Strikes Asteroid LA, Los Angeles, CA; Bryan Miller Gallery, Houston, TX; Mono Practice, Baltimore, MD; Hemphill Gallery, Washington DC; Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA; Towson University, Baltimore, MD; and Europos Parkas Museum, Vilnius, Lithuania.

Granwell earned her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007. She received her BFA in Painting with a minor in Art History from Boston University in 2003. She has been awarded residencies at I-Park Foundation, AS220, Ragdale, and Jentel and her work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, Sculpture Magazine, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, The Globe and Mail, Two Coats of Paint, Maake Magazine, Title Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Art F City.

Granwell is a Professor of Sculpture, Drawing, and Graduate Studies. She currently teaches at The University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Ulrik Lopez studied at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico (EAP) in Old San Juan, and in 2012 was accepted in the art program at SOMA in Mexico City. In 2013 he obtained a BFA in sculpture, minoring in industrial design. He completed an independent program ‘La Práctica’ in Old San Juan in 2014. He was a resident at FLORA ars+natura in Bogota in 2018 and recently received his masters in Fine Arts from Bard College, New York.

His work draws on objects and shapes from human sciences and material and cultural production, mostly archaeology and anthropology of the Americas. He aims to approach cosmic visions, the ritual, the myth, the craft and revised forms of folklore. His practice thinks of the object as a witness connecting with us spectators.

Ulrik has recently held the Pivo residency in São Paulo, Brasil, Paiján 8,000ac in Trujillo, Perú, and at the Delfina Foundation, London, UK.

Ramiro Chaves practice subverts boundaries between disciplines by creating images and objects taken from photographs, drawing, painting, sculpture, and other mixed techniques.

His works take place at the crossroads between his studio practice, education, and documentation. This is the point of departure from which he develops a method in which the accumulation and appropriation of information and objects, products of a personal and creative archaeology, take sense and unfold in a parallel fashion and adopt new meanings within new contexts.

His works can be exhibited in shows but also become products of printed editions or audio-visual material. This results in the imagining of a process of individuation connecting diverse layers and materials coming from diverse sources such as autobiographical experiences, relational narratives, words, diagrams, maps, landscapes, and animals. His practice operates like a mediation that produces new perceptual possibilities and relationships that shed light on how normalcy is defined.

Some of his recent projects include: Proyecto CANADA, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, 2006; el proyecto XXXXXXXXXX, part of the program of Arte Actual BVVA Bancomer – Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, 2012-2014; Lxs brutos, Museo Universitario del Chopo, 2015; Crótalos, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, 2016. He has held residencies including ISCP in New York, 2014 and Beta Local, Puerto Rico. His work has been exhibited locally and internationally. He has led group editorial projects among which Domingo, 2006, Editorial Diamantina; XXXXXXXXXX, 2014, Editorial Neter ; La Loma del Orto, Autoeditado, 2015; MANIMAS , Autoeditado, 2018. He is a founder member of MANINAS and a collaborator of Colectivo MAOF, Puerto Rico.

His work is represented by Galería Agustina Ferreyra.

María Naidich is a visual artist. Her artistic work combines research and diverse production practices most of the time resulting into multimedia installations involving image, sculpture, found objects, light and sound. Her work address topics related to nostalgia for a place, archaeology and nature. With a specific interest in the narratives, objects and colonial structures implied in the construction of an (anthropocentric) imaginary about nature and therefore it´s domestication. Naidich works with phenomena on the edge of the natural and the artificial, questioning the borders around them through fabulative places created from the historical, the personal and the magical.

María holds a MA with honors in Art and Literature Studies from the UAEM in Mexico and a BFA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She was awarded with a production fund for 2022 by the National Fund for Art and Culture In Mexico (FONCA) and recently selected for the 2022 Pilchuck Fellowship Program in Seattle, U.S.A . In 2019 she received a scholarship to study her MA from the National Council for Science and Technology (CONACyT). Her work has been exhibited in individual and collective exhibitions inside and outside México; Salón Acme (Mexico City, 2022 & 2019), Galleri Q (Copenhagen, 2018), HANGAR Barcelona (Barcelona, 2017), Oude Kerk (Amsterdam, 2016) and the Flemish Cultural Center De Brakke Grond (Amsterdam, 2015) among others.