Changing notions of what it is to be human – and, specifically, what it is to have a gendered or non-gendered body in the digital age – is the subject of Buenos Aires-based artist Ad Minolta.
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The exhibition invites us into a space of dissolution, where parameters distinguishing gender classification, traditional painting, and presentation versus content are destabilized. Minoliti frequently references the domestic setting as a site of gender role assignment in her work.
In the Queer Deco Series, the environment of the post-war Californian suburban home is invoked, whilst the heteronormativity prescribed within its framework is simultaneously highlighted and dispensed with.
Minoliti’s work postulates a trans-human utopia, where queer and feminist theories are applied to aesthetic language, design and architecture, continuously invoking the human body both through its insinuated presence and notable absence. Examining imagery from fifties and sixties lifestyle magazines, Minoliti replaces the human inhabitants of these spaces with personified anthropomorphic entites, rendered both digitally and in acrylic paint.
The traditional notions of modern painting and the white cube are destabilized through the integration of work by the artists invited to participate by Minoliti, in the form of textiles, fanzines and video. The works are paired with objects in presentation mechanisms that serve a Modernist utopian agenda: no longer confined to walls, paintings rest on couches and rugs. Furnishings and aesthetic motifs from within the artworks are replicated in their surroundings within the exhibition, via domestic objects or textiles. The works are ultimately pushed beyond the physical space, transferred onto clothes, generated as gifs. At times more or less explicit, Minoliti’s revised modernity reminds us that we are constantly performing gender roles in a space codified for normative sociality.
The exhibition will also include the work of Gaby Cepeda, Faith Holland, Erica Magrey, Graciela Hasper, DV Caputo, UJA (Unión de Jevas Autónomas), Fátima Pecci Carou, Vestite y Andate, María Ibañez Lago and Nicolas Cuello.
Edel Assanti 16th March – 23rd April 2016 Private View Tuesday March 15th, 6-8PM www.edelassanti.com
About The Artist
Ad Minoliti has exhibited internationally at Recoleta Cultural Center, Buenos Aires, Bienale del Mercosur Mensajes de una Nueva America, Brazil, La Maison Rouge, Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal, and the Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires.
In 2013 Minoliti was awarded the Latin American Painting prize, selected from among six artists at ArteBA by Guggenheim curator of Latin American Art, Pablo León de la Barra. Minoliti lives and works in Buenos Aires, where she is co-founder of PintorAs, a feminist collective of Argentinean artists.
