Weekendtip #61

The Colombian Embassy in The Netherlands presents:

COLECCIONISMO Y OTRAS INTERPRETACIONES
Melissa Cruz García & Laura Pardo

29 June till 19 July 2013
QUARTAIR, The Hague

The show emerges from the connections between the artists’ works, as well from their particular interests. Both use the recollection of common household products that usually end discarded by society. This has been employed by the artists as a tool to re-think, transform and reconfigure the objects themselves and also their cultural meaning.

On the occasion of her exhibition in Quartair, Laura will be swapping vegetable and tropical fruit plants that she germinated in her studio for material or immaterial goods. Whoever wants to take home a little plant may do so by getting involved in this non-monetary exchange!

During the exhibition in Quartair, Melissa will be showing drawings, installations and self-made machines. Also, she will be giving a one day long workshop on the 12th of July (from 13.00 till 17.00) on animation with drawings, where the participants are also invited to reflect and think in terms of obsolete technology.

Open: Thursday till Saturday 13:00 – 17.00 hrs.

Workshop: 12 July from 13:00 till 17.00 hour, after this there will be an informal opening.

QUARTAIR
Laura Pardo
Melissa Cruz Garcia

LAURA PARDO
Through her work, Laura scrutinizes the condition of the everyday through the artistic agency and asks how the quotidian, the non-spectacular, the ordinary and the simple, far from being superfluous, can give signs and evidence of fundamental underlying issues. For example some her works look at the aesthetics of the city (house railings, monuments, demolition and replacement of houses by tall buildings) and the graphic information found in common printed matter (labels of daily consumed products, receipts, wrapping papers) to address sociological, cultural and economic changes. She is also interested in the production and meaning of identity, localities and authenticity and public domain in a so called globalized world. Her concerns deal with the connections between artistic practice (observing, collecting, representing, performing) and the practices of tourism (performing places, reading landscape, representing culture).
Laura approaches these issues by working exhaustively with collected material and/or with a specific location and developing works that take the form of drawings, performances, events and paintings.

In 2009 Laura was an artist in residence at CRAC – Centro de Residencias para Artistas Contemporáneos en Valparaíso, Chile. She is co-initiator of Kinderdijk Project, a self-organized art and hospitality space in The Netherlands and she is currently part of Read-in, a self-organised way to teach ourselves about reading.

MELISSA CRUZ GARCIA
Multidisciplinary artist (COL-NL).
Melissa builds principally installations, machines and objects using resources such as light and its principles, analog mechanisms and environments; intending to put the audience in a situation in which he/she is active part of the work.

Her research into light, projection, visual phenomenon and perception brought her to create hybrids, reinvent optical machines and installations based on pre-cinema concepts, optical laws and improvised composition.

Working in this way allows her to make public or rural interventions as also experiments in every domestic place or nomad.

The link between art and science has leaded her to produce makeshift projections, thus creating an optical link between our concepts and perceptions of the world around us. The majority of these works are inspired on themes coming from Art history, the history of humanity, philosophic or scientific theories which she transforms through antithesis reinventing in this way, the new meaning of it.

Melissa was artist in residence in 2011 at Scheltema Complex in Leiden, in 2012 at The National University of Colombia and has being awarded since 2008 with different grants from the Netherlands, Colombia and Germany such as Huygens Scholarship (Nuffic) – Dutch Ministry of Culture and Science, Stroom Den Haag, Colombian Ministry of Culture, Humboldt Lab among others.