Statement of Necessity by Ernesto Oroza

Night Shift
Sleepless Night at Bass Museum of Art and Collins Park 11/7/09

CCE Miami presents Proyecto Habitar
From Oct 16th through Nov 25th, 2009
Raúl Cárdenas / Torolab. White Noise. 2001. Still
Opening reception: Friday, October 16th, 2009. 8:00 p.m.
Location: Centro Cultural Español. 800 Douglas Road, Suite 170. Coral Gables, FL 33134
Dates: From October 16th through Nov 25th, 2009
Curator: Luisa Espino

Since the sixties, cities have changed at a dramatic pace. This has been due in large part to real estate and financial interests, disconnected from collective needs. This deep restructuring has affected both demography and socio-economic configurations. The quality of life within each growing sector of the population has been compromised.

At the end of the Twentieth Century, while some neighborhoods deteriorated, others regenerated socially via occupation by the upper class and so generating a rapid rise in the economic value. Every year, more and more people are displaced from their homes because of abandonment of neighborhoods, land expropriation and re-zoning, rate rises and costs that outstrip salaries. The constant pressures of urban decay, land speculation, the establishment of ghettos, the influx of international migrants or the homeless from neighboring regions makes as essential review of our ideas of habitability.

A group of artists has rallied against these situations, fostering a counter culture where contemporary city decadence is approached from different angles. They challenge housing problems, the use of public space, land speculation, urban settlements on the fringe of legality, enforced desertion of neighborhoods and buildings, urban decay and the formation of ghettos. They demand a new approach to homelessness.

Individual and collective artists such as Raúl Cárdenas/Torolab, Santiago Cirugeda/Recetas Urbanas, Democracia, Gean Moreno, Ernesto Oroza, Juan Carlos Robles and Todo por la Praxis, illustrate the following cases in Madrid, Seville, Miami, Tijuana and Havana.

En un momento en el que las grandes ciudades de los países desarrollados compiten entre sí por convertirse en iconos de modernidad y sus autoridades invitan a conocidos arquitectos a diseñar edificios emblemáticos, está teniendo lugar en paralelo una Arquitectura de la Necesidad o de Emergencia en manos de personas que no detentan grandes estudios de arquitectura, pero a los que las circustancias les han llevado a convertirse en improvisados arquitectos.

Esta exposición reúne varios ejemplos que, aunque distintos y geográficamente lejanos, tienen como denominador común dar visibilidad a construcciones llevadas a cabo por sus propios habitantes, a menudo de manera caótica, en contextos en los que la realidad social ha relegado a un segundo plano la organización reglada que dicta el urbanismo. Situaciones y procesos, en la mayoría de los casos espontáneos, que con el paso del tiempo han dado lugar a verdaderas tipologías en sectores que carecen de servicios sociales y de abastecimiento básicos.

Los artistas y colectivos Raúl Cárdenas/Torolab, Santiago Cirugeda/Recetas Urbanas, Democracia, Gean Moreno, Ernesto Oroza, Juan Carlos Robles y Todo por la Praxis, han dado imagen a algunos casos de Madrid, Sevilla, Miami, Tijuana y La Habana.

Activities at the Cultural Center of Spain are sponsored by the Spanish Agency of International Cooperation to the Development (AECID), Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners.

Schedule is subject to changes. All activities have limited seating. For more information, please visit www.ccemiami.org
Centro Cultural Español
800 Douglas Road. Suite 170
Coral Gables, FL 33134
Ph: 305.448.9677

Bhakti Baxter, Nicolas Lobo, Gean Moreno, Daniel Newman, Ernesto Oroza, and Gavin Perry will be featured in the exhibition, Spit-Polishing a Starless Sky/Outer Space, at Charest-Weinberg Gallery, from September 12 through October 5, 2009. The opening reception will be on September 12 from 6pm to 9 pm at 250 NW 23rd Street, Space 408, Miami, FL 33127.

The exhibition is comprised of two different exhibitions that have been superimposed without any attempt to make them cohere. Two sets of information have simply been brought together, and the resulting form of the exhibition will be determined by the very dynamics of their interaction.

The first exhibition, Spit-Polishing a Starless Sky, is made up of black or nearly-black paintings by Bhakti Baxter, Daniel Newman and Gavin Perry. In the work of all these painters, the black monochrome is entwined with references that belong in cultural spheres that exist far away from formalist concerns. In Baxter’s case, the black paintings double as images of macroscopic phenomena and have a scientific flavor. In Perry’s work, the black monochrome is literally the high-end side of paintings that also trade in lowbrow referents and objects, like cheap rugs and souped up cars. With Newman, the black glaze is all process. He has covered over 200 found paintings with black, turning a gesture characteristic of iconophobia into a delirious flow of production. In a sense, in the work of all these painters, two sets of information are already blended. Each of their works becomes a stand-in for the overall structure of a double-exhibition with incompatible or competing halves.

The second exhibition, Outer Space, titled after a 1999 short film by Peter Tscherkassky, will be made up of sculptural proposals by Nicolas Lobo and Giancarlo Sardone, and Ernesto Oroza and Gean Moreno. Each of these collaborative projects begins with elements provided by the technologies, conventions and infrastructure that form the invisible materiality of our social space. Working through all the engineering problems and ontological recoding that rendering a virtual artifact in actual space brings, Lobo has collaborated with terrazzo mason Sardone to produced a real-life double of a standard bench that can be found ready-made in the design program SketchUp. As the bench took shape, its proportions began to feel slightly off due to some distortion caused the Sketchup rendering engine. What looked like a perfectly bland bench on screen takes on an uncanny air in our physical space. Oroza and Moreno will use the tabloid, of the sort found throughout the city’s neighborhoods, to create both a “catalog” and an ornamental wallpaper pattern from forms determined by the exhibition itself that will, in turn, activate the supposed neutral walls of the space.

All the artists in the exhibition are part of Miami’s burgeoning scene. They have all exhibited their work internationally and are represented in the collections of major museums. This will be the first time their work is shown at Charest-Weinberg Gallery, whose reputation continues to grow as Miami’s premier venue for emerging art.

Miami Noir at Invisible Export,NY, Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza.

Learning from Little Haiti by Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza
e-flux journal issue #6: EXCAVATING THE FUTURE

E-flux Journal Reader 2009 Books:

Visionary Drawing Building
Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza.

Ernesto Oroza will be represented by Alonso Art.
Also he will participate at Project Room: Large Sculptures, and La Habana Pavilion: Two Visions of Cuba

Alonso Art PHOTO MIAMI 2008

STUDIO SCRAP STOOL at Designboom

More info here

NOWHERE/NOW/HERE Exhibition: Laboral Centro de Arte. Download invitation
Curators: Roberto Feo & Rosario Hurtado (El Último Grito), London / Berlin

MONU Magazine. Urbanism in a Minor Key, article by Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza

GISH-artEcodesign/ Gli oggetti della necessità by Ernesto Oroza.
Curator: Allesandra Dini

Espacio provisional at Milwaukee International Art Fair 2008

Espacio Provisional. Dark Fair at the Swiss Institute 2008