VISA Projects | May 2022
Visa Projects is a self-managed, curatorial platform established in New York City in 2022 by Michele Lorusso, focused on contemporary art practices of emergent Mexican artists. Currently, they are presenting a series of pop-up exhibitions titled This (Supposedly) Must Be The Place at Mi Casa Studios NYC.
Visa Projects seeks to assert the presence of a community of Mexican creatives in the US, both physically and ideologically. While articulating diverse Mexican identities, they propose a hybrid model that generates intellectual and aesthetic bonds within North American communities. For Visa Projects, art is a crucial tool for addressing and resolving contemporary problems that involve and affect both nationalities and that is why they believe that creating an accessible approach through art and its communities will facilitate the emergence of other relevant possibilities and perspectives.
Here is a selection of 10 artists from Visa Projects in collaboration with La Pera Projects:
Andy Medina (b. 1993, Oaxaca, Mexico lives and works in Mexico City)
Greca agua detalle, 2022, Enamel paint on spray on cloth, 7 x 38 in $800
Greca agua detalle, 2022, Enamel paint on spray on cloth, 7 x 38 in $800
Language as a medium for his investigation has been one of the predilect paths of Medina’s artistic process, as it has the capability to undress the collective thought. It allows us to observe its weaknesses, point out the prejudices that have been introduced automatically after the imposition of languages, and finally comprehend how a society functions culturally. Oftentimes, concepts such as race, education, work and, just recently, gender, serve as detonators for imperant questions in the production of his pieces and projects.
César Augusto (b. 1988, Mexico, lives and works in Mexico)
His main project consists of a series of experimental textures created under the premise of asemic drawings and Soviet filmmaker Kuleshov juxtaposition experiments where you have a set of images with no link between them.
2022, Digital printing, metallic paper and sand varnish, 20 x 15 in $900
2022, Digital printing, metallic paper and sand varnish, 20 x 15 in $900
Daniel Uranga (b. 1995, lives and works in Mexico City)
2021, Aluminum with brass and translucent resin details, 31.5 x 5.1 x 1.4 in $900
2021, Aluminum with brass and translucent resin details, 31.5 x 5.1 x 1.4 in $900
His artistic discourse is governed under the axis of a formal dialectic, which dialogues with materials in the states they hold in and of themselves, with an attempt to conserve their apparent physical structures. In this way, he utilizes technological resources in automation, robotics and artificial intelligence to elaborate on the abstractions of objects’ foundational elements and principles, which are closely linked with architecture, nature, and antiquity.
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Through the medium of his work, Uranga reflects on the role of production in artistic work, examining the ways in which “techne” plays with its protagonists-as-fabricators through their work. His labor is based on a critical stance that questions the status quo of the current models of accepted art today, and it operates beyond neoliberal constructs and a system in which the categorizations of art and artisanal work are not held at the same levels.
Daniela Plascencia (b. 1993 in Sonora, Mexico, lives and works in Sonora, Mexico)
Mexican Visual Artist, explorer from the Sonoran Desert. Her practice is marked by a material research in which mudlarking for ancient artifacts, foraging and crafting from nature prompts for experimentation of form, color and texture. Her most recent production aims to revalue in an integral way the pottery culture in Sonora by means of studying the regional material and the cosmology.
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2022, Photography, Inkjet on cotton, 23.2 x 16.9 in $380
2022, Photography, Inkjet on cotton, 23.2 x 16.9 in $380
The constantly changing and arid nature and the hunt for clay are processes of knowledge seeking that derive in melancholic connections while investigating in the field. The exchange of energy that occurs between the material and the artist, turns into a memory and symbolic relic in her work.
Daniela Ruiz de Esparza (b.1995 in Mexico city, lives and works in Guadalajara, Mexico)
2020, 35mm Film Photography, 15.6 x 24.8 in SOLD
2020, 35mm Film Photography, 15.6 x 24.8 in SOLD
Daniela is a photographer and digital artist with a degree in Animation and Digital Arts. She has been navigating film photography for over 5 years and how it changes her perception of all things. As light reacts with objects and bodies; the image has allowed her to document her memories. Life’s simple moments are captured simply.
Juan Carlos Guerrerosantos (b. 1994, lives and works in Guadalajara, Mexico)
Guerrerosantos's work explores the legitimacy of the material, combining a wide range of references from the lyrical to the narrative, from pop culture to the classical or religious; Guerrerosantos's work is ironic and provocative, carefully addressing the contextual situations of the site that his pieces occupy in distinct spheres, such as social, material, urban, aesthetic or ecological.
2022, New York City paper map and ink, variable dimensions $300
2022, New York City paper map and ink, variable dimensions $300
Marek Wolfryd (b. 1989, Mexico City, lives and works in Mexico City)
(in collaboration with XiaoFeng and Xiamen RuoYa Arts And Crafts Co., Ltd) 2022, Oil commissioned over cloth, 16 x 19.5 in, Ed. de 3 SOLD
(in collaboration with XiaoFeng and Xiamen RuoYa Arts And Crafts Co., Ltd) 2022, Oil commissioned over cloth, 16 x 19.5 in, Ed. de 3 SOLD
In Wolfryd’s practice, above all, persists the desire to expand the limits of authorship and originality in favor of a poetic of fair use, where the work is only a network of signs woven by a semionaut; the artist, one more link in a chain of production, distribution, commodification and consumption. His relationship with the history of art, guided by curiosity as a footnote, is ambivalent and comprehensive. His series focus on specific historical periods that, not being understood in a monolithic way, interconnect with other points in history, tracing a story that collapses past and present.
Some recurring themes in his work are the project of modernity in the context of Latin America, symbolic values in popular culture and the Western concept of authorship as an instrument of power compared to other narratives. On a formal level Wolfryd explores different artistic media and formats, also having an interest in curatorial practice, museography and cultural promotion as outstretched arms of his work.
Michele Lorusso (b.1994, Puerto Vallarta, lives and works in Mexico City)
Lorusso with the abstraction of his pieces speaks of the poetic action by stimulating conceptual contemplation and self-reflection. His work fuses literature, photography, installation, sculpture, video, performance and painting to understand the environment in which the artist is positioned, and from there explore a more interactive language with his spatial/social environment, and its contexts.
2021, Mirrors, aluminum frame, 5 x 7 x 1.5 in SOLD
2021, Mirrors, aluminum frame, 5 x 7 x 1.5 in SOLD
Recognizing himself as a multifaceted and sensitive human being, Lorusso manifests in his work an extension of his thought to manifest all of his cognitive and sensitive problems. Lorusso's most recent work is a dialogue between light and object, the typologies of space and self-perception through the reflection of light and darkness. Michele Lorusso founded VISA PROJECTS, a vehicle for a generation of Mexican artists to present their work in the Big Apple, NYC.
Natalia Ramos (b. 1993 Guadalajara, Mexico, lives and works in Guadalajara, Mexico)
Her practice is rooted in the direct encounters between humans and objects and how a sculpture can imitate or resemble certain bodily or biomorphic shapes in our collective imagination and thus be perceived as familiar entities. The objects she makes leave space for subjective appropriation in which each person completes the meaning of what he observes. Ramos is interested in the abstraction and decontextualization of objects that surround us and an innovative proposed assembly of them, creating new composition and story possibilities. Shifting the meaning of objects that already have a place in common ground is a way of challenging the object's usual values and hierarchies.
Through contained abstraction, intuitively playing with silhouette, form and flatness, Ramos has a desire for simplification and reduction: losing excess, details, hindrances, and gaining a fresh, and playful approach to a piece, having in mind how the different elements of a sculpture can relate to the human process of becoming and the loss of innocence.
2021, Steel, porcelain, wooden bait and fishing line, 64 x 35.8 x 15.7 in $950
2021, Steel, porcelain, wooden bait and fishing line, 64 x 35.8 x 15.7 in $950
Sergio Andrés Barba (b.1993, Guadalajara, Mexico lives and works in Guadalajara, Mexico)
ceramic, 12 x 6 x 16 in $530
ceramic, 12 x 6 x 16 in $530
Barba’s work is anchored in the materiality of ceramics. In his workshop utilitarian projects and artistic investigations that explore sculptural formats coexist. His formation in industrial design is manifested through the questioning of the object and its identitary role within the psique, that is why he experiments with different relations between its uses and its forms. Ceramic is understood by Barba as a vehicle to stage the passage of time and the solidification of the abstract.
The resultant sculptures of his experiments show the transformative processes that are particular to the technique and suggest an almost alchemical dimension in the crystallization of clay under high temperatures and the unpredictable results of using a mix of enamels and silicas. Through modular systems, the artist tests the material, the inherent fragility of ceramics communicate the unstable permanence, opening up the possibilities of grasping this medium from other perspectives such as corporeality and deterioration.
If you have any questions or are interested in the works by this artist, please contact Blanca or Clara at info@laperaprojects.art