Press Pia Camil

Galerie Sultana, 10 rue ramponeau, 75020 Paris, + 33 1 44 54 08 90, [email protected], www.galeriesultana.com Gaby Cepeda, «In the Studio: Pia Camil», Art in America Magazine, 01 April 2019

In the Studio: Pia Camil

PIA CAMIL’S STUDIO in Mexico City is an expansive, windowless room on the ground floor of an old building tucked away between a wide arterial road and the city’s Parque de Chapultepec. She keeps the basement-like space orderly, and during the workday it is almost impos- sible to imagine it moonlighting as El Cisne (The Swan), a lively cabaret Camil stages there a few nights a year. Word-of-mouth invitations draw a queer-friendly crowd for raucous performances and dancing that continues until the early morning. That Camil envisioned her studio doubling as a nightspot is true to form: her ability to ima- gine new possibilities for architectural spaces and found objects is at the heart of her practice. Disused billboards, outdoor markets, and abandoned construction sites have yielded raw materials Camil transforms into paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and installations that retain the chaotic energy of their urban origins.

Trained at the Rhode Island School of Design in Pro- vidence and at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, Camil was initially drawn to painting but grew tired of its rigidity early in her career. Textiles offered more flexible supports for her experimental vision. She designed cos- tumes for her art-noise band El Resplandor; created huge curtains, dyed in patterns inspired by decaying billboards, Portrait of Pia Camil that enveloped entire rooms; and eventually discovered by Janet Jarman. the aesthetic potential of secondhand clothes. A prolific artist, Camil has created a substantial body of textile sculptures made of denim or T-shirts. She frequently sews the latter together into massive sheets that can dominate architectural settings. But Camil is equally interested in processes of re-creation and revision. For certain works, she alters the installation depending on the venue, and their meanings can be just as variable—a property Camil embraces. Her work is not easy to pin down, as it seems to mutate both formally and conceptually right before our eyes.

Over the past decade, Camil has exhibited internationally with increasing frequency, while her engagement with certain core themes—the relationships between bodies and architecture, domesticity and consumerism, and art and spectacle—has matured steadily. Camil’s working process is often apparent in her finished pieces, reflecting a commitment to transparency that makes her work, however conceptually intricate, seem welcoming and accessible. Still, like many Mexican women artists before her, Camil is anxious about her local visibility. Her investigations into the global exchange of textiles and the long history of modernist aesthetics have resonated primarily outside Mexico; she had her first museum solo show in her home country at Museo Universitario del Chopo only last year.

Many of Camil’s textile projects engage architecture directly, with curtains and wall hangings dramatically altering the experience of a space. The revelers at El Cisne have a similar effect: their collective enjoyment and celebration of community completely upend the function of a workplace. For Camil, both transformations are rooted in a desire to imagine alternatives to the discourse of modernity, to foreground the grit and texture of everyday embodied existence over the gospel of rationality and progress that devalues the ineffable.

GABY CEPEDA: Your work offers a critique of modernism, and specifically of how its ideals of progress were applied throughout Latin America. This line of thought has been taken up by numerous artists in the region. What is distinctive about your approach?

PIA CAMIL: I am interested in modernism, but more so in its collapse and failure. The modernist museum, for example, is supposed to be a site of democracy and plurality, but I’m more interested in tianguis: the open-air markets frequented mostly by working-class people. These are places of exchange: financial, informational, cultural. I source most of the used T-shirts and other secondhand clothes I use for my curtains and sculptures from the tianguis at Iztapalapa in Mexico City.

For the show “Home Visit” [2016], at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, I was among a group of artists who were asked to make site-specific works in one of six private homes in the city. I requested a home in which a working mother lived, where wage labor and the domestic were mixed. This woman, a textile designer, had her office in a glass cube annex that perfectly matched the rest of the modernist house. I wanted to subvert the lan- guage of this architecture: the well-liked, sterile, steel-and-glass type. It is a style that represents a certain status and seems to require no justification beyond that.

I made a huge curtain out of used red T-shirts to cover the glass walls. It was a reference to Mies van der Rohe’s red curtain from the 1929 Barcelona Pavilion, but my curtain was also an element introduced to discombobulate the entire notion of modernity, to bring in a sense of chaos.

My piece points at the ridiculousness of an entire cycle of consumption: a T-shirt design from the First World is manufactured in the Global South, it is then sent to the First World to be consumed, and, when discarded there, it is re-consumed by the South via tianguis, before finally coming back to the FirstWorld as an artwork. I wanted to create a kind of ouroboros in which recycled materials come back to haunt the places that originated them.

There are similar ideas behind Bara, Bara, Bara [2017], for which I made big colorful sheets of fabric by sewing together used T-shirts. Then I stretched the sheets out in the space of Dallas Contemporary with ropes in a man- ner that imitates the way vendors in the outdoor markets in Mexico construct tarp roofs to protect themselves and their wares from the sun and the rain. For my upcoming show at Tramway in Glasgow, I’m remaking that installation. It will be cozier with a more intimate, indoor feel to it; people will be able to lie down and look up at the fabric sheets as an overhead landscape.

CEPEDA: You often allude to work by well-known figures, from Mies van der Rohe to Lygia Pape. This enga- gement seems to come from a place of both reverence and rebelliousness. CAMIL: Collaboration is central to my practice, and I think of these artists as sort of partners. But, at the same time, anything that has even a whiff of being precious or untouchable fucks with me. It makes me want to mess with it, but respectfully—maybe dance with it. I approached Yvonne Rainer’s iconic Trio A [1978] choreography but turned it into a performance [No A Trio A, 2013] in which I did everything I could to obstruct my body’s movement: I wore a body stocking and a mask that limited my vision, I had thick wood platforms on, and I was attached with Japanese bondage-style ties to fifty meters of fabric that traversed the entire building of La Casa Encendida in Madrid. My performance negated the original piece, reducing it to a series of poeticized but failed gestures; to me, it was the stylization of failure.

For “Skins” [2015], a show at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, I used Frank Stella’s notched paintings as a touchstone for a series of geometric wall reliefs I created. The works resemble the artist’s striped canvases of the early 1960s, but I added a few elements that transformed the Minimal compositions into upscale shop displays with copper shelves and clothes hangers, the kind used in expensive boutiques around the world. I also added some balled-up and haphazardly hung fabrics as a nod to the messiness and unpredictability of domesticity as opposed to the very clean orderliness of commercial and art spaces. A few of my recurrent preoccupations coalesced in that show: subverting modernism, the aesthetics of commer- cial displays, and domesticity. It was also the first time I worked with Virginia Juárez, who is now my head seamstress and close collaborator.

A maybe more direct adaptation of another artist’s work was Divisor Pirata [Bootleg Divider, 2016], which saw the materiality of the T-shirt curtain from Cologne [Gaby’s T-Shirt, 2016] reimagined as Lygia Pape’s Divisor [1968]. Pape’s original was a large white sheet with holes in it so that numerous participants could poke their heads through and walk under it as a single, massive unit. It was a comment on the relationship between individuals and the collective, and it was meant as a peaceful protest during the military dictatorship in Brazil. My version, made with purple, pink, and red T-shirts, had similar motivations. It was performed in the streets of Guatemala a few weeks after Trump, with his racist rhetoric, was voted into office. A couple of years later, this materiality mutated again to become Fade into Black [2018], a large curtain made out of deconstructed secondhand T-shirts sewn in a gradient pattern going from white to black. Shown at the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum, the piece was also activated as a divisor pirata and worn by SCAD students around campus. This kind of mirrored the way Pape first staged her Divisor in the favela, and then redid it in the more affluent surroundings of the Museum of ModernArt in Rio de Janeiro.

CEPEDA: You collaborated with other artists and writers as well as with a team of seamstresses for your recent show “Split Wall” [2018], at Nottingham Contemporary in the UK. How do you balance your vision for the work with the contributions of other participants?

CAMIL: Fade into Black was also included in that show, but in that instance it functioned as a theatrical backdrop, a dislocating starting point for the rest of the pieces. There were also ceramics: mask sculptures that refer to the shape of jewelry and necklace displays, and some of the “spectacular” vases shaped after the abstract patterns in scrambled, abandoned Mexico City billboards that inspired a lot of my earlier work.

The new pieces were videos and denim sculptures. I’ve been wanting to make videos and have more team- work ever since “Entrecortinas” [2014] at OMR Gallery in Mexico City. For that show I covered the gallery walls with hand-dyed curtains. It was about the privacy of domesticity and how the labor that goes on inside a home is often obscured. I worked with writer Gabriela Jauregui and graphic designer Sofia Broid on a publication for the show, and Gabriela also performed a reading in my custom-made tunic with the matching curtains as a backdrop. I wanted to continue that collaboration, to extend the performance and continue creating characters. That’s how the video series “They” came to be. The title character of the works shown in Nottingham is a nonbinary person acting out domestic scenarios in surreal spaces that appear to be the interiors of my ceramics and sculptures. The unfamiliarity of these spaces was accentuated by the projections themselves on translucent black fabric: the characters appeared incorporeal.

In one of the videos, the protagonist inhabits one of the ceramic masks as a house: the eyes are the windows through which we see them complete their daily routine of personal and household hygiene: that one is the heart of the story being told in the video series. I really wanted to elevate domesticity while at the same time making it unrecognizable. As a character, They is fragmented and ghostly—wearing a mask inside a mask— which reflects on the invisibility of so-called feminized labor. They is played by Alberto Perera, who wears some elements from drag culture: padding, shapers, and latex, with eerie and beautiful results. The stage and costume design were by Kristin Reger and Chavis Mármol, the script was written by Jauregui, and the denim sculptures and curtains were made with Virginia Juárez, Gabriela Salas, and Citlali Salas. We worked toge- ther throughout the whole process, sometimes improvising—it was a very horizontal collaboration.

My relationship with Virginia and her team of seamstresses is an affective, creative one in which reciprocal support networks—financial, emotional, and artistic—actually materialize.The heart of my artworks is in this relationship with her and the other seamstresses. They represent the affective bonds that cut across every possible reading of the works.

CEPEDA: Some of your pieces reflect on exchanges like this, which are more affective than financial. You sometimes conceive of your work as a backdrop for something or someone else. And swapping has played an important role in your recent projects.

CAMIL: I think of swapping as an alternative economic relationship and one that can be more meaningful than regular economic transactions, especially when it involves a personal, one-on-one dynamic. For “Telón de Boca” [Stage Curtain, 2018], my show at Museo Universitario del Chopo, this was especially important. It was based on the kind of affective economy that led to the formation of el Tianguis del Chopo in 1980, a countercultural market that was originally established where the museum stands now, and that continues to exist a few blocks from there. Swapping LPs, books, and music memorabilia was always a big thing at this tianguis so I wanted to continue that. Assisted by designer Lorena Vega, I printed a hundred and fifty T-shirts with a spiral El Chopo logo, and then exchanged them with friends and with Tianguis del Chopo visitors in booths I set up there and at the museum. People would get a printed T-Shirt, and in return I would get their worn-out black T-shirts with band logos and pictures on them. These were then sewn together and became a very tall backdrop that was used in the museum for music programming. We also hosted a talk with F*ck la Migra and Otros Dreams en Acción, two organizations that work with deportees living in the city.

I am really not precious about my work, and I think its materiality reflects that. I did a series of paintings in 2017, in which I worked with discarded fabric; the last section to be printed during the manufacturing pro- cess will usually have very interesting patterns from printing errors. I collect examples, and in this case they were folded and sewn into the dimensions of a small bed, which can be read as a reference to famous beds from art history, like Robert Rauschenberg’s and Tracey Emin’s. But the pieces also alluded to domesticity and intimate spaces. I made them for a two-person show I had with Ofelia Rodríguez; I wanted the paintings to function as backdrops for her work. She is an amazing artist, the first Colombian woman to get an MFA in visual art from Yale. She was the teacher and I wanted to house her pieces accordingly.

CEPEDA: Lately you have also been hosting El Cisne in your studio. This event combines a few of your favorite subjects: spectacle, bodies, architecture, theatricality, collaboration.

CAMIL: El Cisne is the nighttime alter-ego of my studio: it’s feminist and it’s queer. It’s meant to be inclu- sive and safe. It’s not a club, and there is no social media posting allowed inside. We have shows by drag queens, bands, and other performers. We try to include different people from “outside” the art world in a way that is productive and collaborative for everybody, properly remunerated and non-tokenizing. The local art scene is very machista and malinchista [sexist and racist], so El Cisne wants to carve out a space that is wel- coming but also fun and experimental—that exists right between the seams of different mediums and people coming together. There is a spirit of horizontal collaboration, of improvisation, that has recently gotten more important in my work, and El Cisne is another way to explore this, and also to think about the collective body in a new and exciting way. Lucy Rees, «Mexican Artist Pia Camil Makes Waves at Art Basel in Miami Beach », Galerie magazine, December 2018 Armand Limnander, « The Nine Women Leading Mexico’s Cultural Renaissance on the World Stage », Wmagazine, December 2018

Around the time when Donald Trump was elected president, the artist Pia Camil, 38, started working on one of the enormous textile pieces that have become emblematic of her practice. It was made of hundreds of T-shirts sewn together, allowing for people to stick their heads through the collars. The T-shirts had all been made in maquiladoras—American-owned factories in Mexico that use low-cost labor and export their product to the U.S. without paying taxes. Surplus T-shirts are often smuggled back into Mexico and sold in unsanctioned secondhand markets. “It’s important to call attention to the problems associated with how these items are created and consumed,” Camil says. Although she focused on painting while studying at Rhode Island School of Design and the Slade School of Fine Art, in London, and has done sculpture and performance, her work now, she says, revolves around the idea of audience participation. At New York’s New Museum, in 2016, she created a barter market in which visitors could exchange meaningful objects. At the Frieze New York art fair a year prior, Camil set up a stand to give away a series of ponchos she had made—soon, people were trying to purchase the garments outright, or offering bribes to cut in line. “It was a positive expe- rience, because it generated so much interest and contact with the public,” Camil says. “But at the same time, it starkly showed the market side of the art world, and its power struggle.” Thibaut Wychowanok « Les expositions à ne pas rater », Numéro, Issue 192, April 2018, p.36 Ingrid Luquet-Gad, « Le Temps de la Riposte », Les Inrockuptibles, Suppl., April 4, 2018, p.12-14 (extract) Will Peebles, « SCAD kicks off deFINE ART festival with public performance », Savannah Now, February 20, 2018

SCAD kicks off deFINE ART festival with public performance

By Will Peebles

A mass of about 50 people marched around the northern perimeter of Forsyth Park on Tuesday — all wearing a giant piece of cloth with multiple head-holes made from old shirts.

SCAD called it “an artistic performance that cele- brates diversity” and featured it as the kickoff event for the university’s 2018 deFINE ART program. The festival is an annual SCAD praxis, featuring art exhibitions, lectures and performances from established and rising artists.

The giant group T-shirt is a part of Pia Camil’s most recent work “Fade Into Black,” which will be showing at the SCAD Museum of Art until July 15.

The installation is the latest and largest iteration of her ongoing interest in T-shirts as repositories of cultural informa- tion.

The original artwork is one colossal mass made of more than 1,000 repurposed T-shirts stitched together. It hangs from the ceiling as a soft sculptural work.

SCAD Museum of Art Curator Humberto Moro said most of the shirts are made in Latin America and the designs are printed in the U.S. Some of the shirts are discarded here, and they travel back to Latin America, where they are sold in bulk.

“Pia handpicks the T-shirts and makes them into art, into a piece of soft sculpture that’s also a performative garment,” Moro said. “What we’re doing here is activating this garment with walking, an action that is very simple, but it gets people together in a moment and in a place.”

On Tuesday, two smaller versions of the piece — one made of white t-shirts, one made of black — were worn by SCAD students, faculty and a few bystanders. Camil and the SCAD drumline led the jointly shrouded huddled masses around the park’s sidewalks, ultimately circling the fountain before ending the march.

“This piece is a celebration of diversity, basically,” Moro said. “You know how important it is for us to celebrate every culture, to celebrate every nationality and be aware of how important it is to spend time together, inhabit public spaces and just to get a minute of joy.”

After removing the garment, the participants applauded.

“There’s something magical when you get together with people and you just celebrate something, and we’re celebrating here the kickstart to deFINE ART,” Moro said.

“Fade to Black,” along with many other pieces, receptions, lectures and performances, will be on display during the deFINE ART festival, which runs until Friday. Elizabeth Sobieski, « Crafts Take A Giant Leap Forward », The Huffington Post, December 6, 2017

Crafts Take A Giant Leap Forward

By Elizabeth Sobieski

Pia Camil Bust mask jade, 2015 Enameled ceramic, 15 3/4 x 15 3/4 inches Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo

“We must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions.”- Pablo Picasso

Over the weekend, while perusing a selection of work by emerging and mid-career artists showing in various East Village galleries (with and without air conditioning), I noticed many ceramic and textile pieces being exhibited along with the paintings, photographs, sculptures and installations. During the last few years, the oft-finicky art world seems to have developed an appreciation for arts that are often labeled crafts: innovative and skilled work in ceramics, beading, fabric, glass, wood and jewelry.

In 2013, the late Ken Price was the subject of a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and LACMA; the Met referred to his works as ‘sculptures’, which of course they are, but they are also ceramics, uniquely painted biomorphic ceramics. In Britain, potter Grayson Perry won the 2003 Turner Prize given each year to a visual artist under the age of 50 and organized by Tate. And the esteemed beadwork artist Liza Lou, a veteran of numerous museum exhibits, became a recipient of a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship in 2002. Glass master Dale Chihuly is another example of an artist who transforms a traditional craft, glass blowing, into fine art. Dale Chihuly The Haas Brothers Chihuly Garden and Glass, 2012 Joe Kramm/ R & Company Seattle

Pieces relegated as ‘craft’, based upon media rather than artistry, are finally being embraced as equally worthy to ‘art’. And as a reaction to the fact that some contemporary artists are using less and less personal handwork (and more and more assistants and outside fabricators), there seems to be a new appreciation for manual creativity. New York’s Museum of Art and Design is now showing the Antwerp based Studio Job, which, according to the museum’s site, features “a variety of media and forms, including art objects, furniture, sculpture, lighting, interiors, and wall and floor coverings.” The incredibly inventive and very young (b.1984) Haas Brothers have deve- loped an international reputation for turning their whimsical sociocultural furnishings into high art (although they don’t consider it that.) The Austin bred and Los Angeles based twins will be pres- enting their new work in November at R & Company in New York.

From a historical perspective, it’s important to point out that since the beginning of humankind, crafts have been an important and integral part of our quotidian routines. For milenniums, we have created drinking vessels, woven cloth, fashioned shoes, sewn skins, carved arrowheads, blown glass, invented ceremonial objects and produced jewelry, head decorations and clothes. Items utilized for everyday life naturally evolved into commercial products that were essential to trade and for basic survival. Eventually, painting and sculpture found permanent homes in places like the Vatican and the Louvre, and fine artists began receiving recognition and a measure of wealth, whereas artists working as craftsmen, as blacksmiths and potters, continually took a back row seat to what was acknowledged as fine art. Gerrit Duykinck (1660-c.1712) was the first Colo- nial artist to call himself a ‘painter’ rather than a ‘craftsman’.

Over time, machine-made ware replaced highly personal and hand-forged, painted and decora- ted household items. Plastic cups and factory woven blankets replaced our cultural and esthetic artisanal bounty.

The Arts and Crafts movement emerged during the late Victorian period in England, when anxie- ties about increasingly industrialized products fueled a positive reevaluation of handcraftsmanship and the inherent qualities and traditions of manmade objects and decorative design that cele- brated fine workmanship. The American artist Alexander Calder was deeply influenced by this movement. He was concocting toys and jewelry long before he began painting and inventing his legendary mobiles and stabiles.

Without today’s increasingly active craft-oriented community, products that we take for granted, such as numerous utilitarian objects built from handmade tools, rather than via machine or sweatshop, would have disappeared.

The announcement of the Palm Beach Fine Craft Show being acquired by the Palm Beach Show Group, a leading producer of fine art, antique and jewelry shows, was certainly good news for the international craft community as it will place high end craft next to vetted art and antique booths. The Palm Beach Show Group intends to elevate the Fine Craft Show, already one of the leading events of this type, to an international contemporary craft event on par with the top art fairs. The newly inaugurated Palm Beach Fine Craft Show will return to the Palm Beach County Convention Center for its 14th edition in February. Fine arts and fine crafts will be exhibited simultaneously, as they deserve to be. The Florida show will include unique ceramics, textiles, carved wood and metal objects, furniture and jewelry.

Susan Kadish Françoise Grossen Installation view, 2016 Buddha in Repose, 2016 Contact III, 1977 (detail) Ceramic Manila Rope, Approximately 113 x 350 x 13 inches Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo

The recent Frieze art fair in Manhattan showcased a multitude of craft-oriented pieces, including work by Roni Horn, who studied glass blowing with Dale Chihuly, with her two donut-shaped translucent cast glass sculptural objects selling for $975,000 each at Hauser & Wirth.

The activist Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s one million ceramic sunflower seeds, exhibited several years ago at Mary Boone Gallery, are dramatic departures that triumphantly succeed on a high curatorial level that assimilate the time honored energy and panache of the craft tradition. In a show at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles, Shio Kusaka exhibits hand painted wood grained designs on ceramic sake cups. Multi-media artist Pia Camil’s high fired mask-like totems were featured in her solo show at the New Museum and are on display at Blum & Poe, New York. Last year, fiber artist Francoise Grossen held her first gallery survey at Blum & Poe after a 40 year career. Edmund de Waal, the British author of the bestselling ‘The Hare With Amber Eyes’, has a concurrent calling as a potter creating impeccable porcelain vessels, represented by Gagosian Gallery. These showings are a market barometer of acceptability and assimilation into mainstream galleries Courtesy of Wood Kusaka Studios and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/ New York/Tokyo

It should be noted that Martin Puryear’s wood based sculptural forms are on view at the opening show of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art complimenting adjacent works by Calder. Puryear, represented by Matthew Marks and also a MacArthur Fellow, may be the major contem- porary artist who best exemplifies the art-craft mélange. His current retrospective at the Smithso- nian exhibits 72 of his highly organic objects including 14 sculptures, which merge traditional craft with contemporary art. Puryear also has a massive 40’ anamorphic wood and chain link sculpture on view in New York’s Madison Square Park, through January 8, 2017: ‘Big Bling’.

Last year’s breathtaking Picasso sculpture exhibit at MOMA showed the great master incorporating crafts into his work. His gla- zed ceramic vessels could only be Picas- sos. Craft or art? Why not both? Art should be about the eye of the artist, the soul of the artists, the passion of the artist....and sometimes the hand of the artist.

The forward motion of contemporary crafts, with artists working traditional materials including clay and wood and glass, conti- nues to offer encouraging evidence that a hybrid of crafts in art is here to stay and that purely unadulterated works whether crafted from a lathe or a potter’s wheel continue to be influential and appreciated..

After all these years of deliberately sepa- rating crafts from fine art even though in many respects both disciplines are quite compatible, it should not be surprising that more and more we are seeing first rate museums and galleries incorporating tra- Pia Camil ditional craft mediums into their exhibition Ouray interior, 2015 schedules. MDF panels, copper accessory, stitched fabric, 94 1/2 x 94 1/2 inches Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo Isabella Nucci, « Pia Camil’s T-Shirt Art Stitches Up the Excesses of Global Commerce », D Magazine, July 18, 2017

Pia Camil’s T-Shirt Art Stitches Up the Excesses of Global Commerce

A trio of exhibitions at the Dallas Contemporary explore identity and the detritus of consumerism. BY ISABELLA NUCCI - PUBLISHED IN ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT - JULY 18, 2017

The Dallas Contemporary is currently featuring three exhibitions: Ambreen Butt’s What is left of me, Pia Camil’s Bara, Bara, Bara, and Keer Tanchak’s Soft Orbit. The unconventional mediums favored by each artist help each show complement the other.

Keer Tanchak’s work is placed in the Contemporary’s smaller gallery. One could stand in the middle of the room and spin around to see the myriad of colors in succession as one piece flows into the next. Tanchak created her work by cutting aluminum sheets into odd shapes, defying the limitations of a more conventional canvas.

A piece by Mexico City artist Pia Camil. Photo by Isabella Nucci.

Ambreen Butt explores the concept of identity in a deceptive way. She casts fingers and hands in resin: A detailed red-and-white patterned design is revealed, upon closer inspection, to be a compilation of realistic looking cast fin- gers. I couldn’t help but shiver a bit. She has created other designs with resin-casting, using items such as keys and locks. Other intricate messes of spirals and swirls are made from snippets and pieces cut from paper. The papers are from prosecution transcripts and other source materials that Butt has boiled down to short, indecipherable snippets, a striking comment on political oppression.

Pia Camil’s installations are extremely captivating. Her hand-dyed fabrics, cut and pieced together, create distinct images. One of these, a long fabric hanging from a rod like a curtain, is mesmerizing. The billowing fabric feels fluid, but broken by the jagged geometric shapes of mismatched dyed textiles.

The real showstopper takes up one of the Contemporary’s largest rooms. Tied with white rope, crisscrossing from all corners and suspended above, is a sweeping patchwork of hundreds of T-shirts, ripped and sewn together with the shirt holes gaping open. The installation, “Divisor Pirata,” is interactive, allowing visitors to walk beneath it and even stick their heads through the openings. Camil collected these shirts over the course of several months from the markets of Mexico City’s Itzapalapa, piecing them together as an example of the excesses of consumerism. Bobbing and weaving around the blanket of tees I spotted sorority logos, marathon mementos, and a tee emblazoned with Duck Dynasty marketing. The exhibition is called Bara, Bara, Bara, short for “barato,” which means “cheap” in Spanish. These chea- ply made shirts, shuttled back and forth from Latin America to the U.S., showcase the permeability of borders and the commodification of so much of our lives. Kate Green, « Review: Pia Camil - Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, USA », Frieze, June 27, 2017

Pia Camil Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, USA BY KATE GREEN

A highlight of the 2017 spring season in New York was the clutch of exhibitions featuring abstract artworks by women. The Museum of Modern Art presented the art historical corrective ‘Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction’, and more inspiring still was the Met Breuer’s Lygia Pape retrospective and Luhring Augustine’s well-timed companion show of objects by fellow Brazilian neo-concretist Lygia Clark. Pape and Clark were among the leaders of an avant-garde group of artists who experimented with geometric form and colour in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. In the following decade, they applied this language to participatory ‘open’ works that celebrated the city and its diverse inha- bitants, from Clark’s ‘Bichos’ series (Critters, begun c.1960) – hinged metal sculptures that anyone could reconfigure – to Pape’s Divisor (Divider, 1968), an enormous white cloth through which people of all ages and shades were invited to poke their faces and march together in the streets.

This history hums in the background of ‘Bara, Bara, Bara’, Pia Camil’s current solo exhibition, which occupies nearly 1,200 square metres of the cavernous, converted warehouse of Dallas Contempora- ry. ‘A Pot for a Latch’, Camil’s 2016 solo project at New York’s New Museum, invited visitors to add to and take from commercial goods she installed on grid-like racks. Similarly, ‘Bara, Bara, Bara’ engages with the informal commerce that defines daily life in Mexico City, where Camil was born and is based (bara is short for the Spanish word barato, or cheap). The larger of the show’s two galleries holds the installation Divisor Pirata (Pirated Divider, 2017), Camil’s homage to Pape’s famous work. The version here is a patchwork of seven colourful tarps stit- ched from cotton t-shirts that hang low from the ceiling. The work’s structure references the source of its material: the t-shirts were manufactured in Latin America for consumer use in the US, and then shipped back over the border for resale in informal markets in Mexico, many of which are shaded by tarps. At nearly 800 square metres, Divisor Pirata is impressive, and while its material connec- tion to the inequities of transnational commerce will register for some viewers, its reference to Pape’s piece is much clearer; during the run of the show, it was even deinstalled and paraded through the streets of Dallas.

Pia Camil, ‘Bara, Bara, Bara’, 2017, Camil’s work is more absorbing and lyrical when she synthesizes installation view, Dallas Contemporary. Courtesy: Dallas Contemporary, Dallas; the history of abstraction and the commercial landscape of Mexico photograph: Kevin Todora City using visual language distinctive to her own practice. A cur- tain of five hand-dyed and stitched canvases (Espectacular Telon Toluca I, III, IV, V, VI, 2014) divides an adjacent gallery, which also holds four more canvases, stretched like paintings, and a half-dozen ceramic pieces, called Fragmentos. On one side of this room, a low plywood platform, supported by buckets, serves as a plinth for four of the ceramic vessels. They upend their rigid, geometric shapes (one forms an ‘L’, another an ‘I’) with chromatic shifts in glaze – yellow fades to white then purple, rust turns to black – that emphasize the artist’s hand, just as their hollow centres evoke the human body. Elsewhere in the gallery, several ghostly clay forms resembling masks (Bust Mask Jade and Bust Mask Chalk White, both 2016) animate the commercial shelving units upon which they rest.

Pia Camil, ‘Bara, Bara, Bara’, 2017, installation view, Dallas Contemporary. Courtesy: Dallas Contemporary, Dallas; photograph: Kevin Todora The show truly comes alive, however, with the hand-dyed and stitched canvases, all but one of which echo the shapes and colours of the geometric ceramic forms. The stretched canvases are sumptuous, yet the more than 20-foot-long curtain com- mands attention, with a scale that reveals the source of Camil’s abstract language: the ‘L’s, ‘I’s and hues have been lifted from fragments she encountered on abandoned billboards in and around her home city. The curtain’s shapes, colours and flowing curves evoke the rich history of women experimenting with abs- traction, particularly in Latin America, and revitalize the relevance of this language by bringing it into contact with new materials and current lived experience.

Main image: Pia Camil, ‘Bara, Bara, Bara’, 2017, installation view, Dallas Contemporary. Pia Camil, ‘Bara, Bara, Bara’, 2017, Courtesy: Dallas Contemporary, Dallas; photograph: Kevin Todora installation view, Dallas Contemporary. Courtesy: Dallas Contemporary, Dallas; photograph: Kevin Todora Justine Ludwig, « Mexico’s T-Shirt Artist Makes a Huge Impact in Texas. Who Else Will Stick Up for the Street Vendors of the World? », Paper City, May 30, 2017

Mexico’s T-Shirt Artist Makes a Huge Impact in Texas Who Else Will Stick Up for the Street Vendors of the World?

BY JUSTINE LUDWIG // 05.30.17

Where Mexican street vendors, hundreds of used T-shirts, and commercialism collide: Dallas Contemporary’s senior curator and director of exhibitions Justine Ludwig goes inside the unifying world of artist Pia Camil.

Pia Camil’s studio occupies a former cabaret in Mexico City. The windowless room, painted and tiled in muted shades of green and terra cotta, is cut off from the busy roadways that surround it.

In her studio, Camil experiments with diverse media ranging from mass-produced slat paneling to ceramics, discarded fabrics, and secondhand T-shirts. She has a keen eye and sharp wit, which she uses to explore the societal constructs that define quotidian existence.

Inspiration comes from her surroundings. In the case of the work on view at Dallas Contemporary, it is the streets and shops of her hometown, Mexico City.

Titled “Bara, Bara, Bara,” the exhibition pays homage to the rhythmic cry of street vendors. Short for the Spa- nish word barato (cheap), the calls draw attention to the vendors’ wide variety of low-cost goods available for sale.

Camil’s massive, site-specific installation Divisor Pirata is comprised of T-shirts acquired from the street mar- kets of Iztapalapa in Mexico City. (As a whole, “Bara, Bara, Bara” was built to resemble the handmade cano- pies of the markets where said shirts were purchased.)

The artist deconstructs the shirts individually and sews them together, creating vast stretches of fabric. Each shirt makes its own declaration, while serving as a component for a larger whole. Originally produced in Latin America, the shirts employed by Camil were first sold to retailers and organiza- tions in the United States before illicitly landing in the bargain markets of Mexico.

Camil furthers the shirts’ transit by bringing them back to the States — this time displaying them as art. In doing so, she brings attention to contemporary trade routes and the permeability of borders.

There is humor in the diversity of companies, causes, and television shows represented on each brightly colored T-shirt awning — Baby Dolls Dallas/Fort Worth strip club, Dunkin’ Donuts Coolatas, Arrested Deve- lopment, Duck Dynasty — which is furthered when the public plays with the piece, lounging beneath it and sticking their heads through openings in the fabric.

Much like the markets it reflects, Divisor Pirata is a public space of continual communal interaction.

Divisor Pirata draws inspiration from Lygia Pape’s seminal 1968 performance Divisor, in which community members of Rio de Janeiro walked together through the city, connected by an enormous piece of white fabric, with each participant’s head poking through. It was a poignant illustration of the tension between individual identities and the collective.

In turn, Camil’s Divisor Pirata was first activated at the Nuevo Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (NuMu) in Guatemala City — the country’s only contemporary art museum. The large stretch of interconnected T-shirts covered the egg-shaped exterior of the NuMu.

On December 14, 2016, the fabric was taken off the building and — much like Pape’s Divisor — a wide range of people stuck their heads through the various T-shirt openings and walked in unison through the streets of Guatemala City.

Last month, the same invitation to walk in Camil’s work was extended to Dallasites during a collaborative event with Soluna, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s arts and music festival. One of Camil’s massive tarps was de-installed from Dallas Contemporary, and participants walked as one through the Dallas Design District.

Pia Camil’s “Bara, Bara, Bara,” on view through August 20 at Dallas Contemporary, 161 Glass St., 214.821.2522.

Images: Artist Pia Camil (Photo by Sukilynn) / Pia Camil’s «Divisor Pirata,» December 14, 2016, Guatemala City (Photo by Pia Camil) / Pia Camil’s «Bust Mask Eggshell White,» 2016 / A street market in Iztapalapa in Mexico City (Photo by Pia Camil) / Pia Camil’s “Divisor Pirata” in the exhibition “Bara, Bara, Bara” at Dallas Contemporary (Photo by Kevin Todora) Jodi Bartle, « pia camil: the mexican artist talks », The Fifth Sense, i-D, April 19 2017

INTERVIEW - JODI BARTLE -19 APRIL 2017 pia camil: the mexican artist talks There are two themes that roar through the symbolic and increasingly participatory work of Mexican artist Pia Camil; Mexico City and the destabilization of things.

Sprawling, ancient, chaotic Mexico City is Pia Camil's birthplace and birthright - her knowledge of the city and the ease at which she has learned to navigate it informs her work at a basic level. Born and raised there, it was her mother who introduced her intimately to the sensory overload of Mexico City, ‘knowing every nook and cranny like a cab driver’ and this, she says has had huge impact on her intuitive, intimate and subjective work.

At 16, Camil left for boarding school, then to the US and finally London for grad and post grad studies at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Slade School of Fine Art. The plan was to become an artist ‘somewhere else’ but from Lon- don she was deported and returned to Mexico City: this forced reorientation forms the basis of her significant work. ‘I was quite surprised by the city and had a new perspective on it because it had been decided for me. Now most of my work deals with the relationship between me and the city and how I find ways to access it or comment on it.’

The other overarching strand in Camil’s work is an intention to destabilise things ‘in order to fuck things up, to find new meaning in things and not just take them at face value.’ Camil’s 2015 Frieze show in New York was a starting point for her kind of destabilisation - she flipped the phenomenon of the major international art fair and art market on its head by giving away 800 ‘habitable paintings’ in the form of ponchos for free. Camil’s other works with disused billboards, abandoned highway buildings, repurposed shop fittings, formalised paintings and participa- tory performance work are ‘contradictory and layered and complex, and woven within these ideas is Mexico City itself because it is a complex city - a monster.’ Espectacular Telón I-VI, 2013 (Installation shot) Hand dyed and stitched canvas Variable dimensions What is it about Mexico City that inspires you?

The spirit of Mexico in general is always an inspiration but I tend to target speci- fic areas of the city. I work with lots of outdoor secondhand markets in marginal neighbourhoods with a large working sector and they are informal and conflicting and plagued with lots of economic, social, and political issues. Intuitively I seek these places out because they are engaging visually, aesthetically, even by the sound. Everything is an experience, an overload of shit, so sensorially charged and it is not the experience you get from an ordinary city. It is crazy, noisy, the smells are intense, everything about it is intense.

I like the nature of when things are in a chaotic unstable place, because I find points of engagement more easily as opposed to things being in a gentrified state. In New York I find it incredibly boring and some places in Europe I think ‘fuck, man, it’s so orderly and perfect.’ I hate to generalise but perhaps artists feel drawn to this instability, like New York in the 80s, which goes to say that Mexico is not the ‘it’ place to be. I think that Mexico City has always been like this, inside, forever.

In what way has your experience of going away and coming back given you a different viewpoint? Do you need distance and absence to be able to claim a thing and see it more clearly?

Yeah, going away helps. It had to become unfamiliar for me to recognise it again, otherwise it is too much part of your everyday landscape, but the other side is that you realise it works because it is familiar to you and you know how to navi- gate it properly. An artist friend showed me an Instagram photo of an artist who is not from Mexico City and she had on a disguise of a wig and glasses and a hoodie and she was proud she was going to a badass neighbourhood which is still badass but not what it used to be back in the day. We both laughed because you get such a different understanding of the city when you are here; you know the codes and the language. It is interesting to me how these codes get broken down when you are from here, or you are not from here, and how you perceive that. In my case, it is a mix of enough familiarity that I can be very fluid and go in and out of these places quite naturally, but then when I am in there I am not necessarily 100% part of it. I am seeing it with a type of subjectivity, I guess. What do you consider yourself? Sculptor? Painter?

That’s a tricky one - I don’t know. I trained as a painter and I remember a tea- cher at Rhode Island Design School saying that no matter what medium you do, you always think as a painter. That stayed with me, because I have done lots of different shit but I always see them compositionally, in a very formal way, like a painter would. But I don’t necessarily think of myself as a painter even though the work looks to a formal engagement and aesthetic. That’s been changing more and more with my interest in offering an element of participation in the work. It is a conscious decision to let that formality go a little bit and introduce more play and a little bit more of the unexpected into the work and the formal element has been slowly diluting. All the labels dilute as you grow older and you get more immersed in your work.

Is that where your creative journey starts - seeing things differently and also putting different questions to the same stuff that everyone else sees?

For me, yeah that is part of it, but the other part has to do with an urge to use your work as an output for something. If you don’t have that output, you find it quite frustrating to deal with your own stuff…it is like a muscle. The more you exercise it, it becomes a world you can easily access in and out of, like a very per- sonal language. My work now is on a different scale but it is exactly what drawing used to be for me when I was little, just this little place I could go to to express stuff; then you become older and it’s much more of an elaborate vocabulary. All the labels dilute as you grow older and you get more immersed in your work.

Your work has increasingly highlighted the importance of collaboration. Can you tell me about that?

I have always liked collaborating and after I became a mum it seemed like the idea of me being alone in the studio just wasn’t going to fly. My textile work is with groups of seamstresses and it became natural - this relationship I was buil- ding with women I was working with is intrinsic to the work. I am trying to bring this to the front of the work as opposed to an element that never gets discussed. Not ‘Oh look, what amazing work Pia does’; instead there is a whole story behind. Lately I have been titling the work with the first names of the seamstresses as a way for me to recognise them.

Most of the seamstresses I am working with now are part of a collective. They live in one of the areas have been going to and I think of it as a place I don’t just go to as a tourist, where I might buy a t-shirt then go back to my house - no, I go to the market and I stop by at the seamstress’s home and I am there for a little bit and they talk to me about the issues of the neighbourhood and whatever - you just shoot the shit and talk about their problems and I talk about mine and it is a climate I like to foster when I make the work.

So what happened at Frieze 2015?

The free poncho thing immediately set off an incredible response from the public from the most positive to the most negative. In the end it was a successful piece Divisor Pirata, 2016 Second-hand t-shirts (from the market in Iztapalapa) 6 m x 14.5 m Divisor Pirata, 2016 Second-hand t-shirts (from the market in Iztapalapa) 6 m x 14.5 m because it brought all this stuff out - I remember after the first day I went back to the place I was staying at with my boyfriend and I just cried. He was like ‘Why are you crying? It’s been amazing, great…!’ and I was like ‘It was horrible!’ I hated seeing that! It was crazy.

Why?

Some visitors were bribing other people to be able to cut the line, or name drop- ping - ‘I am so-and-so, can I cut the line?,’ people offering money - $1000 for a poncho right then and there. This was not the point of the project - you needed to fucking get in line. Other people were so mad: ‘I’ve been standing for three hours and I didn’t get a poncho so, whatever, I will just take this one’ and just ran off. It was incredible. Then you see the good side of people coming up and ex- changing shit for the poncho, saying this was such a nice project, the energy you put into it, and they gave me little things they had with them in return.

Your 2016 work ‘A Pot For A Latch’ was an extension of the idea of exchange. What was different this time?

I wanted to emphasise the importance of getting something back in return and generating an idyllic economy system in a bubble. Visitors were asked to bring an object of no significance except to themselves and to exchange it with other objects in return. It was in the New Museum gallery where one facade is just glass, so I thought it would be nice to do a store front - where you can be win- dow shopping, typically New York. It was a simple setup based on how markets in Mexico City put things in a minimal formal way - a grid system. First we started being really strict about what the objects were but then I realised the more you let go, that’s where the heart of the piece lies. People were bringing very signifi- cant stuff and it was much friendlier than Frieze. For me this piece is important because it gave so much value to the spectator formally and conceptually - they make the work. I set up the structure and the rules and the public made it hap- pen, bringing amazing shit and great stories. Frontera, 2014 Hand dyed and stitched canvas 240 cm x 240 cm Images courtesy Blum and Poe Wearing – watching, 2015 800 ponchos made from second hand fabrics. Commissioned and produced by Frieze Art Inc for Frieze Projects New York 2015. All photos by Timothy Schenck. Courtesy Frieze Art Inc. Frédéric Bonnet, « Consumerist Abstraction. Pia Camil. », Cura, n°24, Winter 2017, p.198-201

CONSUMERIST ABSTRACTION. PIA CAMIL by Frédéric Bonnet

Highly coherent despite its spatial and for- there by an anonymous public – that public mal variety, the work of Pia Camil presents again – who were invited to come on an “ex- us with a unique combination of problems change day” and leave an object that would that relate to urban spaces, the consumerist feed the project, in exchange for an original world and coexistence. sweatshirt designed for the occasion. As a statement stressed: “The monetary value of Anonymous people are visiting a contempo- these items is insignificant; their value lies rary art fair in the most normal way. We are instead in their richness of meaning and in at Frieze New York in May 2015, but what di- the new life that they acquire on the grid.” stinguishes these enthusiasts is the way they are dressed, since over the top of their There is an obvious correlation between this clothes they are all wearing high-contrast exchange logic and the notion of public space colored ponchos. These costumes by Pia (or space open to the public), and the art spa- Camil (born in Mexico City in 1980) take on ces of New York are ultimately only a step a filiation with their glorious elders, Hélio Oi- away from the streets of Mexico City where ticica’s Parangolés. They are all unique, made Pia Camil lives; this is a step the artist was by assembling pieces of fabric, and are avai- eager to take. Because it was indeed in the lable from the stand of the Parisian gallery streets of her native city that her work took Sultana. One last point – not a trivial one – shape, through very specific attention to the is that they are offered on condition that they innumerable billboards that populate the be worn for the entire time spent at the exhi- city, particularly abandoned ones, which in- bition: crowds at the stand and guaranteed spired a process of reflection that is just as success, such is the unconventional, almost rich as it is complex. transgressive logic of donation, gratuitou- sness and exchange at an event which is no- From their observation and from photogra- thing but a temple to trade! phic archives that the artist patiently compi- led in the course of her urban wanderings, This notion of exchange was once again the artist drew the material for her project central in the work offered by the Mexican Espectacular, begun in 2012, which quickly artist during a 2016 solo exhibition at the became multiform. Its first pieces were can- New Museum in New York. In the ground- vases on stretchers, and then a second floor gallery, her work A Pot for a Latch pre- phase consisted of curtains hung in exhibi- sented a succession of gridwall panels on tion spaces, subtly hinting at considerations which were hung various objects that appea- relating to the condition of women in the do- red to have no formal or typological cohe- mestic sphere. What these works all have in rence. And for good reason, since none of common is that they present colorful pat- them was the result of any wish or choice chworks, which are striking because their ex- made by the artist, but were rather brought tremely diverse colors and patterns always

198—HOT!

achieve harmony through a curious sym- It is through this prism that one can inter- biosis between the dynamism of a color- pret those ceramic masks that constitute ful abstraction that does not renounce a an abstraction from a female body, suffu- Latin American heritage, and the buzz of sed with references both to pre-Hispanic an urban energy. Beyond the context, this culture and to urban consumption – their energy no doubt comes from the way these shape being inspired by the jewelry stands pieces are constructed using fragments found in shop windows. Above all, this and collage, because they are never a real abstraction linked to the body is connec- reflection of existing billboards, procee- ted with the idea of performance, tested ding rather from an imagined reconstruc- particularly with the ponchos deployed at tion based on scanned photos of these. Frieze New York, which openly cited Oiti- cica, taking additional inspiration from the There were also developments in the pro- inhabitable-painting dimension of his Pa- ject in the field of ceramics, with pieces rangolés, where protagonists are invited that were once again presented as frag- by the artist to come and “inhabit” his work. ments, almost like details detached from a whole to which they impart another form The practice of collective performance as- of materiality, another kind of vocabulary sumes an ever-greater importance in the in the course of an unwritten narrative work of Pia Camil. This is shown by the built on the power of free association pro- enormous blanket made of assembled t- vided by abstraction. shirts, which spent a few months envelo- ping the façade of the delightful NuMu, By playing with a certain fluidity in this the Nuevo Museo de Arte Contemporáneo way, through mediums that offer multiple in Guatemala City, which is not only proba- entries and an easygoing transition from bly the world’s smallest contemporary art one to the other, the project Espectacular museum, but is also housed in a very uni- – which favors experimentation instead of que egg-shaped architectural structure. forcing itself to follow one line of logic – For Divisor Pirata (2016) Pia Camil took in- was able to impose two of the guiding ideas spiration from Lygia Pape and her work in Pia Camil’s work: the importance of the Divisor, which consisted of an enormous idea of abstraction generated by fragments, white canvas punctured with holes through and a central exploration surrounding mass which the heads of performers gathered culture, particularly consumer society. underneath could pass. Here the canvas is replaced by second-hand t-shirts marked This is obviously not far from Guy Debord with slogans typical of American culture, and his Society of the Spectacle, particu- a market for which they were specifically larly through the curtain form, which would made in Mexico before being exported seem to translate an intersection between and brought back… as contraband. Before entertainment and consumer culture. As covering the NuMu, this blanket gave rise

Bust Mask Jade, 2015 Photo: Cooper Dodds Courtesy: the artist and Blum & Poe, los Angeles/New york/Tokyo (opposite page) Angeles/New los york/Tokyo Photo: Cooper Dodds Courtesy: the artist and Blum & Poe, Bust Mask Jade, 2015 for the abstract vocabulary, beyond its vi- to an action in the parks of Guatemala sual and semantic power, its uniqueness City, expanding the field of investigation in Pia Camil’s work lies in how it reflects outside of the individual’s relationship Installation view, A Pot for a latch, New Museum, New york, 2016 Photo: Maris Hutchinson / ePW studio Courtesy: New Museum, New york (p.199) (p.199) / ePW Photo: Maris Hutchinson studio Courtesy: New Museum, york 2016 New Museum, york, for a latch, A Pot Installation view, an idea of the body and urban navigation. with the collective, in order to question, in “To me, abstraction constitutes a return these difficult times, Latin American iden- to the body, and the fragments should be tity in the face of the dominant power of indicative of a body, but never in a de- the United States and, beyond this, the re- scriptive way,” Camil says. “What inte- levance of a message when it is displaced rests me is using the body as a tool for towards other geographic, economic and communicating in abstract terms.” social contexts. With the subtlety of ab- straction, as always…

HOT!—201 Keshav Anand, « The Best of Frieze London 2017 », Something Curated, October 5, 2017

The Best of Frieze London 2017

From 5-8 October, the 15th edition of Frieze London, under the direction of Victoria Siddall, platforms more than 160 leading galleries from 31 countries, showcasing ambi- tious presentations by international emerging and established artists, supplemented by a curated programme of artist commissions, films and talks. Something Curated highlights twelve must-see exhibits. (...)

Pia Camil || Galerie Sultana, H8

Covering two walls of Galerie Sultana’s booth, Pia Camil’s installation is comprised of t-shirts that were manufactured in Latin America, sold to the United States, discarded, and sold back illicitly to Mexico. The artist’s work is usually associated to the Mexican urban landscape, the aesthetic language of Modernism and its relationship to retail and advertising. In her recent work, she has engaged in public participation as a way to activate the work and engage with the politics of consumerism. Bridget Gleeson, « Inspired by Franck Stella, Mexican Artist Pia Camil Shows “Skins” at Art Basel’s Choice », Artsy, June 14, 2016

Inspired by Frank Stella, Mexican Artist Pia Camil Shows “Skins” at Art Basel’s First Choice

ARTSY JUN 14TH, 2016

Pia Camil Valparaiso Green Interior, 2016 Galería OMR

In his iconic “Copper Paintings” (1960–61), American artist Frank Stella deviated from conventional materials to experiment with shaped canvases and industrial paint. Now, more than 50 years later, Stella’s creations have inspired a new body of work by the Mexican artist Pia Camil. Pia Camil Pia Camil Sleeve Roe Interior, 2016 Pagosa Springs Interior, 2016 Galería OMR Galería OMR

Camil is a native of Mexico City, where, as in many places, slatwall paneling is frequently used in shop windows and retail displays. In “Skins,” her solo exhibition for Galería OMR at Art Basel’s First Choice, she merges these two inspirations by using Stella’s onetime material of choice—copper—to re-create forms from his groundbreaking series that also speak to the slat paneling typically found in commercial spaces. She affixes shelves and hooks to her constructions, lending a functional air to their geometry. Note, for instance, the coat hanging from a hook in Sleeve Roe Interior or books resting on a shelf in Pagosa Springs Interior (both 2016).

Pia Camil Ouray cloak III, 2016 Galería OMR Pia Camil Pia Camil Pia Camil Bust Mask Earth, 2016 Bust Mask White Crackle, 2016 Bust Mask Copper II, 2016 Galería OMR Galería OMR Galería OMR Also hanging on hooks throughout the exhi- bition are cloaks Camil created in collabora- tion with Erin Lewis, a sustainability-minded British fashion designer. The garments, which were made with throwaway material that was improperly dyed, are likewise inspired by Stel- la’s paintings.

Nearby, Camil’s ceramic masks are nods to the bust-like forms used to display jewelry in shops and department stores. Like any kind of man- nequin, the forms are idealized versions of the feminine face and figure. Their inclusion could be read as a critique of the advertising industry and, more particularly, the widespread mani- pulation and repackaging of the female image to sell pretty much anything.

On the other hand, the masks are playful symbols of celebration, cultural rituals, and the theatre. They remind us that we all play different characters, and our wardrobe is an expression of creativity. We can take on a new role at any time, Camil suggests, by choosing a new mask. Fittingly, the exhibition’s center- piece is a stage that invites viewers to try on the custom-made cloaks and, by extension, different personas.

—Bridget Gleeson

“Pia Camil: Skins” is on view at Art Basel’s First Choice, Jun. 14–15, 2016. « Why to Buy Pia Camil’s Wearable Works of Art », Artspace, May 6, 2016

Why to Buy Pia Camil’s Wearable Works of Art Artspace Editors | May 6, 2016

Here’s everything you need to know about Pia Camil’s functional (and fashionable) Artspace Edition.

Born and raised in Mexico City, Pia Camil creates installations and performances that often incorporate a degree of audience participation. Her New Museum solo show “A Pot for a Latch” earlier this year allowed visitors to take a com- ponent of her art with them in exchange for an item of their own, while her contribution to the 2015 Frieze New York Projects section saw her giving away self-made ponchos (inspired by the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica’s «Parangole» series) that quickly became the Instagram hit of the fair.

Fabrics in general are central to Camil’s work, which has become highly coveted in recent years—her stitched-canvas “pain- tings” didn’t last long in Blum & Poe’s Frieze New York booth last year. She’s also made textile reproductions of Mexican billboards in the past, a reflection of her ongoing interest in employing the strategies of capitalist mass production in the context of contemporary art.

In this new Artspace Edition, produced in collaboration with the sustainability-minded fashion designer Erin Lewis and benefitting the New Museum, Camil turns to her roots in Mexico City to source unwanted factory fabrics, which she then transforms into wearable shirts for the art-conscious clotheshorse.

Camil’s new works are a variable edition, meaning no two are the same. There are two types of shirts on offer: a work shirt with an attached multipurpose bag, and a party shirt sporting a strap that can be styled as a bag, one-of-a-kind items for any occasion that your wardrobe (or art collection) didn’t know it needed. Dylan Schenker, « Pia Camil: A Pot for a Latch », this is tomorrow, April 15, 2016

Pia Camil: A Pot for a Latch

Title : Pia Camil: A Pot for a Latch, 2016 Website : http://www.newmuseum.org Credit : Courtesy New Museum, New York. Photo: Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio

Pia Camil: A Pot for a Latch New Museum, New York 13 January - 17 April 2016

Review by Dylan Schenker

It’s hard not to compare Pia Camil’s first solo museum show, ‘A Pot for a Latch’, to the excesses of social media. Today, concepts such as sharing or community are inextricably linked to the frene- tic, over-stimulating pace of online platforms. We share so much of ourselves, so often, that much of it loses its potency in the process. Camil’s exhibition, which opened mid-January in the New Museum’s Lobby Gallery emphasizes a form of community that fosters a deeper engagement with what is shared.

A stuffed toy rodent with a rubber old man mask and a C-clamp clasped to its head, a reflective tor- so with a Cinco De Mayo mask - upon entering the gallery these are only a couple of the objects, or combination of objects, that one could discover hanging from a series of red metal grid walls within the space. They wouldn’t necessarily be the same ones seen by other visitors, depending on which week they attend the show. That is because the items included are traded in by visitors to the gallery during open exchange days.

During the first week of the exhibition, participants were given limited edition sweaters in exchange for their trades. Each subsequent week on exchange days, participants were allowed to trade their objects for those hanging in the Lobby Gallery. Visitors can’t trade in just anything, however. The artist and volunteers sit at a table and ask each person what their personal attachment is to their chosen object. They then must sign a contract explaining this story.

Many of the objects, like bad paintings or a book on Amish cooking, feel like nothing more than random tchotchkes. They are the kinds of things one would find at a garage sale, that are othe- rwise elevated through their presentation within the exhibition.

Reasons for an exchange are never made explicitly clear to visitors. Only the objects are present. So while the meaningfulness of each offering is not immediately apparent, their inclusion in the dis- play at all is suggestive of a history or narrative. We don’t assume the objects are being discarded since their purpose has run its course, but that there is a desire to share their importance with other people. There is a tension, then, between the willingness to let go and how much that object means to the person giving it up.

Their arrangement is up to the artist, who playfully combines offerings such as a Mickey Mouse head-shaped lunch box with a naked body suit; a record sleeve placed behind a Keith Haring art book that, when looked at from the front, looks like it says, “The Association of Powerful Babies”; and a net oranges bag with a stuffed banana inside of it (which calls to mind the joke, “orange you glad I said banana?”).

In an era of sharing where intent is extensively premeditated and we output so much of ourselves into the wider world, a show that invokes suggestive, over-explicit meaning is refreshing. On a Fa- cebook timeline, for instance, everything is contextualized within the projection of a life lived. With this in mind, Camil’s red grids function contra their digital analog as a proto- or folk-network. Also, in the same way a social media timeline results in unintentional juxtapositions between mosaic representations of people’s lives, new meanings are created through this exhibition of disparate objects.

As opposed to an online network, where users superficially scroll through other people’s lives as they are being presented to them, Camil’s objects network encourages further engagement. Parti- cipants are required to imagine their own reasons for the objects being chosen for the show rather than it being made clear why they were included. It is an Internet of ‘things’ predicated upon com- munity and storytelling instead of explicit information.

According to New Museum’s press release, Pia Camil often collaborates with local artisans using “laborious fabrication processes,” to “deaccelerate the frenetic pace of mass commodification through the handcrafted production and intimate quality of her works.” In this case visitors to the museum stand in for the artisans through their contribution of meaningful objects, but the result is largely the same. Through ‘Pot For a Latch’, Camil creates a decelerated social network that culti- vates meaning creation. Karen Rosenberg, « Artist Pia Camil on Infiltrating Instagram With Her Subversive Takes on Shopping and Other ‘Capital- ist Strategies », Artspace, January 23, 2016

Artist Pia Camil on Infiltrating Instagram With Her Subver- sive Takes on Shopping and Other “Capitalist Strategies” Karen Rosenberg | January 23, 2016

Pia Camil in collaboration with Guillermo Mora, No A Trio A, 2013. Inaugural performance, La Casa Encendida, Madrid. Courtesy the artist.

Last year’s Frieze New York was unusually colorful, even by the standards of this dizzying mercantile environment, as visi- tors paraded down the aisles in capes patched together from brightly hued fabric remnants—wearable art, distributed free of charge by the Frieze Projects artist Pia Camil.

As part of her recent solo exhibition at the New Museum, the Mexico City-based artist (who shows with Blum & Poe in New York and Los Angeles) also encouraged visitors to walk away with some of the art. This time, however, they have to give something in return: an item of personal significance. The idea was to turn the museum’s lobby gallery into both a thriving marketplace, modeled on the famous La Merced in her hometown, and a performance stage that plays up the increasingly transactional nature of the art experience in our selfie-seeking, fair-driven age. “It will be successful as long as it makes people aware of the shopping experience and how naturally it comes to us,” Camil says of her installation, which was titled A Pot for a Latch in homage to the Native American potlatch ceremony, where tribal leaders would give away (or destroy) vast troves of goods as displays of wealth.

This January, while putting the finishing touches on her installation (which was on view through April 17), Camil met with Artspace deputy editor Karen Rosenberg to talk about what artists can learn from social media, why commercial interven- tions like hers are the new Relational Aesthetics, and what to make of the perpetually “emerging” Mexico City art scene.

Installation views of "Pia Camil: A Pot for a Latch," 2016, courtesy New Museum, New York. Photos: Maris Hutchinson/EPW Studio

What was the impetus for your New Museum project, A Pot for a Latch?

It came out of my extensive research on low commerce—markets, dol- lar stores, and the equivalent to what you would find here in Chinatown or the fashion district. Downtown Mexico City is a highly commercial area, but for low-end commerce. There are a lot of stores that have the same type of display—slat-wall paneling, grid walls. The studio where I was working at the time was right next to one of the biggest markets of Mexico City, La Merced. It spills out into the street and most of it is black market, and they use the same type of layout. It’s really dense— one grid wall after another after another.

When I see something like that, I usually find some art reference that engages me. In the case of the slat walls, I imme- diately thought of Frank Stella’s linear paintings. So I did a show of those, adapting and reconfiguring slat paneling into Stellas. And with the grid walls, the reference is Sol LeWitt—I saw a drawing by LeWitt that was pretty much what you see when you’re standing in the entrance of this gallery, a moiré pattern of repeated grids. And then I came across some Agnes Martin drawings I really liked.

You’re talking about this work, and the inspiration for it, in very formal terms. What about the participatory ele- ment, the exchange of items with visitors?

After that formal structure was defined, then I started working with other ideas. When I started thinking about exchange, I started to read about early economic systems. The first thing I came across was the potlatch, in Marcel Mauss’s book The Gift. He uses this term, potlatch, to describe Native American economic systems, but also as a general term for any sort of primitive society’s systems of exchange. It was a contract you would establish with a person or group of people— once 10 years of production I have been looking at my city as a Mexican, because I was born and raised there, but also with an outsider’s eye—focusing on things that people in Mexico are pretty used to, like the abandoned billboards.

Yes, you did an earlier series about those billboards. What was it about them that caught your eye?

The city landscape is saturated with billboards—once in a while, you see an abandoned one. It’s the failed aspects of the city that are calling out to me. Big corporations put these billboards in the cheapest real estate, which is probably a shack that’s going to fall apart. Sometimes a billboard falls on top of a house, and then it’s just left there—a Coca-Cola ad, on top of a shack. There’s something there that I think is important to highlight. Most of my works are not deep critiques; they just sort of highlight things.

Mexico City has a reputation as a very artist-driven scene, but fairs are an increasingly assertive presence. How have they changed the city’s art scene?

When a person from outside goes to Mexico City, they fall in love with it because they like this sense that it’s “happening.” I always laugh about this with older artist friends, who have been through it before. A curator comes along and says, “I love the city, it’s really just happening,” and we’re like, “It’s been happening for 50 years!” The nature of Mexico is, it’s constantly redefining itself. We lack a structure to hold onto, so there’s this sense of spaces opening and shutting, artists coming and going, and it just keeps evolving because there’s no economy or infrastructure to really hold it in place. I could point to two galleries that are successful that have been on the scene for 30 years—but only two.

What has changed is that now we have this constant of the art fair that we never used to have. I think that has helped things, but I almost think that it’s just going to stay in that “happening” place. The fair has improved, and more people do go to Mexico. A friend of mine opened an alternative to the Zona Maco fair, Material Art Fair, and I’m hoping that changes things. But as I said to Brett, the director of the Material fair who’s a good friend of mine: “You made a fair that looks exactly like other fairs.” To make an alternative commercial fair that looks like any other fair, in a place like Mexico City that has incredible variety—I wouldn’t think that’s the way to go. The city offers a lot more. Do you think all artists today have to be conscious of how their work will play out on social media? And is that kind of consciousness liberating or inhibiting?

You don’t necessarily have to tap into it, but some awareness of how things function now does benefit the work no matter how formal it is. We have to be aware that it’s not the same world that we were in 10 years ago. We don’t have this contemplative, Mark Rothko experience of sitting for 20 minutes in front of the painting. Now we have a minute at most, and we don’t even look at it because we turn our backs to it to look at ourselves in the reflection of the iphone. How do you make work that still provokes an experience in the viewer, considering that new nature of art viewing? That’s something I’m more and more aware of.

What is your relationship to the artists of the Relational Aesthetics movement, who are known for giving away objects and emphasi- zing shared experiences?

We tend to see works like Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Relational Aesthetics type of work within the framework of art. I think the most successful places to explore now are commerce, shopping, things that have more to do with capitalist strategies. My piece at Frieze was almost like a bargain sale. I had people line up, and you could go and choose your poncho and take it with you. It’s a very simple thing, but it was pretty effective.

The Frieze fair might have been a commercial context, sure, but here you are working within a museum. Isn’t that the framework of art?

At the New Museum I am working with a space, the lobby gallery, that is a little bit like a storefront. The performative aspect of the work lies in this relationship: people that are out here eating their lunch or having their coffee, looking at people shopping in a contained, quarantined environment.

I’ve always said New York is like being in a walk-in store—it’s one single shopping experience. You’re always thinking, “Could I get that? Could I not get that?” When I come here that’s the first thing that jumps out at me, because I live in a very different type of city.

Can you elaborate on some of those differences between New York and Mexico City, and how they affect artists?

Mexico City is just a monster. There’s a saying we have, in Spanish: “It doesn’t have head or feet.” I don’t even know how it functions. 20 million people, and the economic and political situation that we’re in—it just seems like no city could withs- tand that. But it does, and it’s this kind of big monster that is strangely very easy to appropriate. You don’t know what to expect, but at the same time that allows you to make it whatever you want it to be. And that’s what I really like, because it’s not a city that is given to you in a package like New York, where every post-graduate and graduate kid comes with a very specific set of expectations.

It’s very permissive. You can do anything, basically. That’s not necessarily a good thing—you can do anything because cor- ruption is incredibly bad, and so you can get away with a lot! But, for art-making, it still has what I think most artists look for, which is a sense of really getting into the city and being able to experience things at a very personal level.

I spent a few years away, and when I came back and saw it with different eyes I kind of fell in love with it again. In my last you gave something, it was implicit that you were expecting something back in return. There was something there that I thought would be really interesting to apply to art and the art market: How could you re-establish contracts with people that weren’t just purely based on economic value?

I did an edition of 100 sweatshirts, which have a text—they’re pretty much like a contract in a sweatshirt. The idea was that I would give those out for free and get 100 objects in return, and then start a system where every so often we would exchange an object on the grid for another object that was brought by a member of the public, and then it’s pretty much up to the public to give the piece its character.

This piece has certain similarities with your project from last year’s Frieze New York, in which you distributed colorful capes and ponchos to fairgoers. But at Frieze you were giving away something for free, and not really asking for anything in exchange.

The two projects are totally connected. But the Frieze one was—I always describe it as a little bit perverse on my part, because I wanted to play around with fair dynamics. Art fairs have changed our experience of art, and also the artist’s expe- rience of art-making—artists now produce work around the fair schedule. It’s a little insane in that regard. So I thought, in a place where everything is worth something, I’ll just give out something for free.

There was this piece by Hélio Oiticica that I really liked, that put the spectators at the center of the work by having them wear cape-like paintings he called «parangoles.» It’s a very old work, and his context in Brazil in that time was completely different, but I thought it would be quite interesting to play with those dynamics in a fair context where a lot has to do with people-watching and desire. I thought, I’m going to flip the fair on its head and have people own the work and be part of the work.

You could also say, though, that you were actually asking for something—you were asking people to share images on social media, to take part in a performance.

For sure. I wrote in the proposal for the fair that the way I wanted the piece to be distributed was through people’s selfies. So every time I gave a poncho out, I would remind them: #piacamil. What that did is, that piece is now a document of people’s experience with the work. To this day, there’s still people uploading photos of themselves wearing the ponchos. You see people in cabs, people on the beach—that sense of the piece just living out there, in such a personal way, is something I really liked. So for this project at the New Museum, I made the editioned sweatshirts because that’s another way this piece is going to live on. And people have started uploading photos. Gabriela Jauregui, « Pia Camil », Artreview, March 2015, p.70 Michael Slenske, « Curtain Call: A Mexican Artist On The World Stage », Modern Painters, July 2014

Curtain Call Curtain Call Modern Painters Modern Painters July 2014 July 2014 Curtain Call Curtain Call Modern Painters Modern Painters July 2014 Curtain Call July 2014 Modern Painters July 2014 Curtain Call Modern Painters July 2014 Curtain Call Modern Painters July 2014 Filipa Ramos, « Pia Camil: Espectacular », Mousse, n°48, April 2015

« Phaidon’s Frieze NY interviews – Pia Camil », Phaidon, April 9, 2015

Phaidon’s Frieze NY interviews – Pia Camil We speak to 2015's Frieze Projects participants, including Pia Camil, the artist giving away clothes at the fair

Documentation photograph of frieze projects process, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.

What tends to catch your eye more readily at an art fair: the works on display or the crowd peru- sing them? Often, the people attracted to events such as Frieze and Art Basel are as entertaining as the art. However, the Mexican artist Pia Camil plans to blur this distinction at Frieze New York. Camil, who was educated at the Rhode Island School of Design and at the Slade in London, will present her Wearing-watching project at the fair next month, as part of the fair's specially commis- sioned Frieze Projects.

Read on to learn how you might come to wear one of her 800 ‘wearable pieces’, and in so doing, you change the rules by which art is viewed and consumed, making selfie snapping just as impor- tant as taking in the art. Documentation photograph of frieze projects process, 2015. On the wall: Tunica para mujer, 2014. Hand dyed and stitched fabric 160 cm x 300 cm Courtesy of the artist.

What are you doing at Frieze? I have set up a booth inside the fair where we will be giving out approximately 800 wearable pieces, for free. The booth will be set up like a shop, so that visitors can have a look at the work and hopefully pick their favorite one. They are all incredibly unique, since they have been made with fabric leftovers or remnants. Some have print defects; others have been discolored with the sun, or include marks or notes made by the vendors. Each piece was assembled individually with the help of a great staff (artists, friends, and a group of female seams- tresses whom I admire very much and regularly work with).

Why are you doing it? The project is called Wearing-watching and it is a take on [Brazilian artist] Helio Oiticica’s parangole series. Oiticica wrote a short essay describing that the act of wearing a parangole established a direct, almost magical, relationship between the spectator (or participa- tor) and the work, where the act of wearing and watching became the same thing. Oiticica’s au- dience is very different to the audience now, and that is exactly the point. Set in an art-fair context, the piece forces us to establish a different set of rules. Asking a visitor to wear a piece of fabric, not only demands the direct participation from the viewer but exemplifies the experience of art fairs in general, where the act of looking at art is just as important as that of looking at each other and oneself. Art fairs are a strange phenomenon, this is not necessarily a bad thing considering it has changed the way we assimilate, and learn about art and to some extent change the way artists produce work. Whether I like that or not is irrelevant, I am more interested in seeing how a piece like this will activate and hopefully highlight those interactions, as well as find its own conduits for distribution (via selfies or other unexpected networks). How do you hope Frieze New York visitors will react? I don’t expect everyone to wear it then and there but I hope some people do. The more people wear them the more recognizable it becomes and therefore activates the wearing and watching principle. Also, as I mentioned before, the work is designed so that it exists in different platforms. Some will chose to parade it as a fashion item or a desirable object, through selfies, whilst others will be encouraged to use it as a picnic blanket in Randall’s Island park, therefore establishing a more direct communal interaction. Some will take it home and value it as an art object and who knows others may give it away. The fact that it is free is unexpected and makes it even more desirable, I’m hoping it will attract all sorts of crowds because of it.

How does it fit in with your practice? Because of its performative qualities as well as the way the pieces were constructed, the project is somewhere between the outfits I used to make for El Res- plandor (a performative music band), and the hand-dyed curtains and paintings from the Especta- cular series (2012-present) where I make one to one reproductions of abandoned advertisements

El resplandor outfits, 2009-2011; various fabrics; variable Dimensions; courtesy of the artist Pia Camil

or billboards in Mexico City. In previous works, I have used fabric for its associations to the body and our relationship to architecture (For Sale 2010), and other times like in the performance No A trio A (2013) it worked more as a sculptural element.

Which other artists do you admire or find inspirational? Aside from the fact that I often go blank when asked this question and that the list is always changing, there are of course some old time favorites like William Leavitt, Bruce Nauman, Paul McCarthy, Lygia Clark, Robert Smithson, Mathias Goeritz, and of course Helio Oiticica.

For greater insight into Helio Oiticica’s work get our Brazil book; and don’t forget about our Bruce Nauman and Paul McCarthy monographs.