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.