Chantal Peñalosa
There’s something about the weather of this place
March 13 - April 17, 2021
There’s something about the weather of this place brought together works in photography, painting, and video that broadly address the sociopolitical tensions that pervade the U.S./Mexico border through investigations of the mutual clime, shared firmament, and bifurcated landscape of this charged region.
The camera is aimed at the sky to create photo diptychs that record the subtle shifts in cloud formations that happen in the time it takes to cross the U.S/Mexico border.
A video records a performance work made on Avenida México, a street in Tecate, Baja California, that runs along the border between Mexico and the United States in which the artist assumed eye-level height with a USA border patrol truck parked on a small hill to survey the border by sitting atop the roof of a house. She first sits with her back to the truck and describes the scenery to it; she then turns to face the truck creating a one-sided dialogue with her action.
Another video work reconciles a childhood memory of a colloquialism that explains, through myth, the phenomenon of condensation trails formed by the engines of aircraft “crossing the border” several miles overhead.
Blank canvases coated with white paint were laid on their backs and exposed to the falling ash and soot created by the wildfires that plagued the California/Baja California border region in 2019.
A custom fragrance is crafted through collaboration with a chemist that faithfully reproduces the smells one encounters at and around the Tijuana/San Diego border. This fragrance will fill the gallery for the duration of the exhibition.
Through gestures and actions that intervene in everyday life, Chantal Peñalosa establishes dialogues with entities that apparently cannot respond: memories, rumors, architecture, stones, clouds, aromas, or gestures. Performative actions archived in photographs, sculptures, installations, publications, or videos dialogue with phenomena such as waiting, the unnoticed, and the passage of time, shining light on political and social issues. She has recently been working on art history and literature passages that seem to be forever on standby, having been omitted, forgotten, or rejected.
Her work has been shown in institutions like M HKA Museum, Belgium (2019); ESPAC, Mexico (2019); XII Bienal FEMSA, Mexico (2018); Museo Amparo, Mexico (2018); CCI Fabrika, Russia (2017), La Tallera, Mexico (2015); ZKM Center for Art and Media, Germany (2015), MUAC, Mexico (2014), amongst others.
