NICTINASTIA
Johana Unzueta
29 Noviembre de 2017 - 01 Abril de 2018
Curaduría: Michele Fiedler
Chilean artist Johanna Unzueta, reflects about the history of labor, industrial processes, and about modernist sociocultural movements. Her work in the formats of scultpure, drawing, video, installation, wardrobe design, actions, and publications assimilates elements from the geometric discourse of Latin American vanguards specifically in relation to kinetic art and the Brazilian neo-concrete movement as well as that of artists like Hilma af Klint, a pioneer of abstract art.
Her Project Nyctinasty is a sculptural mural that incorporates some of the industrial materials used in the manufacturing of Acapulco chairs as well as the craftmanship techniques employed to produce them, immediately evoking memories of a luxurious past, leisure time, and the Golden era of Mexican show business. The geometric forms, which appear to be multiplying through meiosis (a form of cell división and reproduction)
come from imagining an esthetic abstraction of nyctinasty—movements made by the leaves of some plants in order to optimize energy, resting during the night and waking up again in the morning when the sunlight comes out. The mural has allusions to labor, vacation privilege, biological responses, and to the manufacture of synthetic industrial materials. Unzueta’s work does not disclose a particular story, instead it often combines multiple layers of signification through its images, materials, and the space where it is shown or produced.
During her residency at La Tallera, Cuernavca, in 2015 Unzueta studied Siqueiros’ archives finding a correlation between the muralist’s drafts on visual perspective and her own drawing practice.
La Tallera’s gardens, visible from the studio where Unzueta was drawing, are replete with tropical plants like the Mostera, Shefflera, and Flamboyans, that create a play of shadows and light over the walls and lawn; incidentally, Cuernavaca, known as the city of eternal spring, housed intelelctuals and political exiles between 1950s and 1970s, spawning another kind of a Golden epoch distant from Acapulco’s international actresses and actors filled days.
All these ideals could have been present in the conceptualization of Nyctinasty, still, the circles, ovals, and lines that compose the mural are part of a visual language that the artist has been developing and expanding on over the past few years, that also suggest a logic of the warps and woofs of weaving or of wave lengths, and which’s forms don’t need a concrete definition.
- Michele Fiedler, Curadora
About Johanna Unzueta:
Johanna Unzueta (1974, Santiago de Chile) lives and works in New York City. She studied art at the Universidad Católica de Chile, where she lived until the year 2000.
She has exhibited extensively in Europe, North and South America, having individual exhibitions at Galería Gabriela Mistral, Santiago de Chile (2016), the Queens Museum of Art, New York (2009), and the Galería Chilena, Santiago de Chile (1998). She has participated in group shows at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts of Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; London Museum, in Ontario, Canada; Museo del Barrio, in New York, NY; David Rockefeller Center for
Latin American Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; and Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, among others.She was a resident of La Tallera in Cuernavaca in 2015. Since 2008 she has co-edited and published artist books with Felipe Mujica.