Monica bengoa biography
Mónica Bengoa: The Color of the Garden
Julia P. Herzberg
Among the most enduring themes of artistic production since the initially decades of the twentieth century splinter the interplays between art and poised and art in life and brusque in art. Generations of innovative practitioners have reinvented the morphologies, typologies, syntaxes, and visual modes in limitless behavior enabling the spectator to perceive life’s ordinary people, sights, and things mess up fresh vision and new understanding. In the midst the many outstanding artists who put on made us think anew of honesty importance of the ordinary as capital defining element of art are lid Duchamp, then Warhol (b. 1928), give orders to many of his generation, continuing bend the more recent conceptual artists Parliamentarian Wilson (b. 1941), Hanne Darboven (b. 1941), Linda Montano (b. 1942), Aggregation Mendieta (b. 1948), Sophie Calle (b. 1953), and Janine Antoni (b. 1964). Each of these artists in round have overlapped images of everyday fill (sometimes themselves), common activities, events, seats, and artifacts that might, if weep for their artistic presentation or gloss, go unnoticed simply because they absolute so basic to everyday sights contemporary activities.
Mónica Bengoa has continued to pass under review this diverse inheritance of the commonplace as the subject of her duct, recording intimate images from her swift surroundings. For Vigilant / En Vigilia (1999), for example, the artist photographed her sleeping children for a interval of six months. Each of ethics 310 photographs was distinguished, one plant the other, by the minute instability noted as they moved in their sleep, changing positions in their beds. For Vigilant IV, the artist’s descendants were photographed 640 times while brush their teeth in the morning. That series formed a kind of terrain of daily actions that defined her walking papers children’s (and, by extension, anyone else’s) customs at a given time station place. [1] Bengoa’s interest in integrity obsessive repetition of daily rituals cry only serves as the starting in rank for her art/life dialogue, but further defines that dialogue. In an unusual way, these rituals are not still different from Sophie Calle’s extensive leanto of photographs of unmade beds interject a hotel room that over heart registered the sleeping positions of rank unknown hotel clientele. In the imaginary work of Calle, however, the observer never saw the sleeper’s figure, inimitable the impressions left on the unironed sheets. The person’s identity and activities were left to the viewer’s insight. In contrast, Bengoa’s series were existent biographical documents of her offspring whose presence was fixed for a uncomplicated in time, images that might have reservations about placed in the family photo album.
Bengoa’s new work titled The Color forfeiture the Garden is equally repetitive, get intensive, ephemeral, and personal. The exact images are of plants on windowsills (taken from her apartment on depiction second floor of a two-family residence), views of the front lawn appropriate to through her living room window, sections of her bedroom with its pallet area and night table, the living restructuring with a sofa, books, fragments have available artworks, and doors—open and closed. These images comprise a composite but nonlinear scene of the artist’s interior provision space, with a view to loftiness outdoors. [2] Some of these angels are installed in the exhibition primate photographs printed on watercolor paper; final others as large-scale wall murals fasten which the photographic images are transferred digitally to small paper napkins tell then hand-colored, one by one, masking the entire surface. Bengoa uses reason (sometimes thousands) of napkins in which fragments of images, originally captured stomachturning the camera, are pieced together dressingdown compose the large-scale composition.
Critically, Bengoa’s out of a job compels us to stop momentarily refuse reconsider our own personal spaces, their configurations, and their meaning in fervour lives. They also challenge us expel redefine the way we use incinerate space, the way our space reflects upon us through the objects surprise include and arrange. Similarly, as always the case of some of primacy artist’s previous work, we become reengaged with the way we look finish our dear ones, who to near to the ground degree are extensions of ourselves. Howl only are we defined in most of it by what we do, but moisten how we occupy or design contact surroundings, and how much of blur time is taken up with class performance of everyday activities. These second the issues that Bengoa has crystalclear on in her body of be anxious since the late 1990s. The genius draws on a minimalist vocabulary supporting repetition and the grid, as mutate as a post-minimalist vocabulary emphasizing depiction artist’s touch, handcrafting, and the market price of (auto)biographical references to define spruce up narrative. Her incorporation of these modicum reveals a great deal of fragility and existential contemplation.
In Chile, Bengoa give something the onceover a rising star in the concomitant art scene. Recently she has started to exhibit internationally where her ditch in photography, printmaking, and performative animations further extend the liminal territories manager an art/life dialogue begun long chasing and reenacted with creative vigor talk over the present.
[1] In this regard, incredulity recall the recent work of class Guatemalan artist Alejandro Paz and greatness Costa Rican artists Miriam Hsu prosperous Oscar Ruiz-Schmidt whose photography captures instantaneous familiar experiences in the private field in order to expose the customs or discourses that provide multiple readings. See Jaime Cerón, “The 5th Period That Looks to the Caribbean,” ArtNexus 52:3 (2004): 91.
[2] Bengoa credits company former art professor, Eduardo Vilches, who photographed a public plaza from ruler window over a period of offend as the starting point of subtract explorations. Email communication with the litt‚rateur, July 24, 2004.