From A to Z

Imagen por Raquel Perez Puig

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"Golf, Alfa & Romeo " 

From A to Z

Imagen por Raquel Perez Puig

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“From A to Z” 

Hidrante 

1 de diciembre 2017


Mendoza Sánchez presenta su primera exhibición individual en donde explora la apropiación de manera multidisciplinaria a través del collage fotográfico y lo escultórico. Como resultado, nos brinda una instalación que pone en evidencia sus investigaciones conceptuales del alfabeto fonético junto al potencial recursivo del sentido en el lenguaje.



El sentido, o la intención con la cual se expresa una palabra, resulta siempre contingente del contexto en el que se ejerce. Su significado no es otra cosa que esta contingencia que Mendoza Sánchez torna en un juego, trastocando en este caso lo que toma como partida, el alfabeto fonético, para producir imágenes que expanden el sentido primario de este alfabeto. Inicialmente creado para comunicar con precisión una letra a través de palabras, Mendoza Sánchez nos apunta entonces hacia la imprecisión de cualquier lengua o vocabulario irrelevantemente de su uso original.



“From A to Z” enseña algo más innato aún del lenguaje, concepto con el cual Mendoza Sánchez ha trabajado en el transcurso de su carrera emergente. Con imágenes populares y una formalidad primitiva del diseño gráfico que remite a nuestros tiempos de los medios de comunicación social, Mendoza Sánchez apunta la mirada en esta ocasión nuevamente hacia lo escultórico para expandir aún más las posibilidades lingüísticas que ha explorado anteriormente a través de la pintura, las instalaciones monumentales en donde se ha apoderado del espacio público e incluso a través de la música con su participación en “La Exitosa”, agrupación que no se aleja de sus enfoques artísticos. 



"Whiskey", Acrilico, aerosol, barniz sobre madera tallada, dimensiones variables. 

Imagen por Raquel Perez Puig 

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For Manuel Mendoza Sánchez’s A to Z


By Ren/Rachel Ellis Neyra, Notes on complex attachments, 27 November 2017


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As a kid, I masturbated thinking about Sofía Loren. I don’t have a narrative to go with this memory, just a repeated visual emanation of her, a projected surface.


In the technicolor film Housebout (1958), little Robert gets to be carried in the arms of Sofía Loren (in the film, she is Cinzia). I remember watching Houseboat in 1989 on TMC with my Tata in West Palm Beach, Florida. Tata lived in West Palm after having lived in San Francisco, after having entered Cuban exile in the early 1960s. To unknot the discourse tied to Cubans who left the island early in the Revolution, my family was not rich and is not white. When I was a kid, I remember people at Publix and at department stores would assume that my mother was my babysitter, because I was a light-skinned child, and, I’m sure now, because of the racialized help that white people had in south Florida in the late 80s. I look almost identical to my curly-haired brother, and I look extremely related to my brown-skinned sister. But the racializing looks of others would defamiliarize us. I remember not being able to see how they could not see what I did: we all belonged to each other then. Perhaps the beginnings of my anger at whitening projections have to do with sensing a gaze that alienated my body from my mother’s. Surfaces can conceal attachments.


Sofía Loren’s face transferred onto the cover of Life magazine, transferred onto a plain white Tee. Transference is a process of re-directing your emotions to a substitute, specifically to your therapist. It is a misplacement. The wrong addressee for a bubbling-over, historical sensation. But transference is also just part of a process of feeling and re-signifying your emotional history, your complex attachments to objects, bodies, and dynamics.


My mother, Ana, looks like Sofía Loren. I also remember people saying this to her when I was growing up. A form fitting flare in her self-delightedly playful, femme dress, an accent that was not the listener’s accent, and her Lebanese face were all registered as exotic.


I want to be Robert(o)’s man-child-head against Sofía Loren’s breasts. How to engage: you are watching and wanting to be Sofía; or watching and wanting to be the child on her breasts; or you are ambivalent to all of this erotic mami-nene possibility. Later in the film, Roberto rejects Sofía/Cinzia as a mother figure, just as his father, Carey Grant, is considering her as an amorous object for himself. For a while, Cinzia cannot offer the Good Breast for Roberto’s mouth, otherwise often preoccupied with a harmonica throughout the xenophobic film. She becomes the Bad Breast for Robert. Of course, as D.W. Winnicott was writing around that time in his studies of child psychology, Roberto would come around. But the attachment is now more complicated, for mami gets to be the Good and the Bad Breast.


I did not relate to Robert(o)’s rejection of Sofía/Cinzia as a kid. What was the big deal? So she had other shit to do, other demands and desires. Her body means more than one thing. Sofía was my mother. And she was not my mother.


I started masturbating very young with a giant Teddy Bear that my mother had bought me at Publix. My sister had a similar Bear. I would use my Bear’s nose to hump and stimulate my child-dick. Years later, my sister told me that mom chastised her for my masturbation – surely I learned it from somewhere. She and I shared a room when young, so a certain logic would make my older sister responsible for my perversion. Maybe I did see her masturbating. Maybe I didn’t. Either way, my perversion and complex attachments are mine and not just mine – they are in the world.


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It is 1992. I am a 9-year-old who listens to Kriss Kross, wears Air Jordan sneakers, a purple Hypercolor T-shirt, and white denim Guess? shorts. Hypercolor T-shirts are animate. On the playground at Eisenhower Elementary School in south Florida, under the flagpole finger-wagging the stars and stripes and a black flag that flaps Just Say No, you bring your lips to the threads around my torso. You blow hot breath over my chest, my belly, even my armpit, and Poof. I am marked with your heat. Photosynthesized. Poof, we are faggots. Embered. Pigment transforming our desires. You are JP, Rémy, Audra, Davíd, and Kelly. You are not exactly aware that we are blowing each other after the end of the world, or, anyways, after the fall of Communism, during the AIDS epidemic, in the beginnings of the Special Period in Times of Peace in Cuba. All of this and more, Gulf War Syndrome, Anti-pornography laws, U.S. presidential attacks on the Humanities, Wu-Tang’s spit-shined rhymes, Nirvana’s ungargled moans, Reggaetón’s dembow boom, it’s all in the zeitgeist of your blow that hypes my second skin in this damaged, magical, multilingual world.


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Desire relays cultural-political attachments. I have an attachment to the T-shirt as an object that micro-billboards a politics, that intramurally recirculates codes for those who already share them, that is social and anti-social, cheap and deluxe at the same time. A surface that renders repetitions and workings through. Texturing this is Félix González-Torres’ Untitled (1991)billboards of tussled, sweat wrinkled, now empty bed sheets. The traces that lovers leave. When I think of T-shirts, I think of Joey Terrill’s Malflora and Maricon and Juan Downey’s Chile Sí / Junta No. And I think of the T-shirts of former lovers and friends that I’ve held onto for 10, 15 years. Jaws, Epcot Center, one that reads If you want to make somebody happy / Mind your own business.


Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse (1977) holds 82 fragments, what he calls figures. It is an encyclopedia of amorous possibilities, anxieties, desires, and traces. It runs the erotic gamut – To be engulfed, Waiting, To hide, Demons, Dependency, Body, Jealousy, Unbearable, Monstrous, Magic, Drama, Errantry... It is a collection of attempts to understand the traces of having. It is not in alphabetical order, but like an alphabet, and the Tarot, it helps us remember obstacles and movements.


Writing about associative, visual re-significations, and familiar objects made strange, or, rather, their uncanniness brought to the surface, makes me think I should return to Theodore Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections From A Damaged Life (1951) and another book by Barthes, Mythologies (1957). But I am not offering an interpretation of Manuel Mendoza Sánchez’sA to Z; like the speaker of A Lover’s Discourse, I am concerned with the amorous traces in my attachments, and what I can sense of his, what they re-speak in the world. Masculine ephemera. Surfaces conjure depth and invert outsides.


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Manuel’s T-shirted Sofía marks the month of November, and recalls so many escorpiones I love – Olga, José, Nicole, Pablo, Juan, Marina, Melissa (cusp creature). Here are notes from another damaged life, traces of a nonfascist life, written from a houseboat that survived Hurricane Sandy in Far Rockaway, New York, to Hidrante that lives after and with Hurricanes Irma and María in San Juan, Puerto Rico. From island to island, hear my fingers splintered with cold, smell my Sissy Boys, Unite! Tee crackling with firewood, taste my hair salt-sprayed, as I write across from a visual emanation over video chat of a mami, the body, Cuban-ish pervert de la Caridad who I love.


Ren/Rachel Ellis Neyra (born in Memphis, Tennessee, 1983) is a poet-theorist, Cancer Sun + Leo Venus. They’re an Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University and live in New York. Ren thinks and writes about sound, synaesthetics, and Latinx, Caribbean, and American poetics and art. You can read more art writing, academic writing, and poetry via rachelellisneyra.com 

"X-ray" From A to Z

Imagen por Raquel Perez Puig

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Aprender a decir

Luis B. Méndez del Nido


Una sociedad se eleva de la brutalidad al orden, afirma Valéry. Si la barbarie es la era del hecho, de lo real sin adornos, del todo inalterado, es imprescindible que el orden y las instituciones de la modernidad, sean el momento de la ficción, y de la mentira, dice. Es decir, que lo que verdaderamente separa al hombre de la bestia, es su capacidad para decir lo que no es y ver lo que no está. Lo humano está siempre en el engaño. El arte, y la creación toda, es esto. Aristóteles España, casi un siglo después y desde un Chile convulso, por su parte, se aventura a decir que la tarea del poeta, y del artista, es vencer el miedo, para que el miedo no tenga miedo. Por lo que el arte es, también, sospecho, una valentía adolorida e irredenta. Asimismo, Neruda, desde un Chile anterior y en un raro arranque de lucidez, maldice a los españoles, que nos lo quitaron todo con su conquista, pero que todo nos dieron, porque nos dieron las palabras. Por lo que el arte es, de igual forma, la capacidad y el atrevimiento de decir. Estas tres cosas son las que suceden en estas paredes esta noche. Este triple proceso es lo que ahora nos rodea. La creación sin tapujos es la que inventa sus propias definiciones, y pone, esta vez, las palabras a su real servicio. Las palabras, que son la institución más antigua que hemos heredado, y el lenguaje, quedan en la noche de hoy a merced del arte, que las reinventa hasta humillarlas, de una bonita manera. El arte, y la libertad, son esto y esto, precisamente, es lo que conlleva aprender a decir.

Yankee

Yankee

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Zulu
Papa.

Papa

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La idea detrás del libro parte del interés por la semiótica y ver como las distintas funciones que se otorgan al lenguaje (en este caso la fonética). El libro es una compilación de sobre 55+ fotos tomadas del internet, su function queda interpretando directa o indirectamente las palabras del alfabeto fonético actual. El libro se puede interpreter de multiples maneras pues es un libro de palabras pero con la falta de palabras al igual. Un libro cuya version de 35 copias, se presta para analizar el origen de estas palabras, usar como juego a interpreter, e inclusive a indagar sobre los temas seleccionados para ilustrar. El libro fue presentado en el Moma PS1 Art Book Fair en el booth Galería Embajada en el 2016.

The idea behind this print comes form my interest in semiotics, and me trying to understand the different functions that language entails (in this case the phonetic aspect of language). The book is a compilation of 55+ pictures taken from the internet whose intent is to interpret both directly and indirectly the words chosen for the actual phonetic alphabet. The book can be used in several ways, considering it is a book about words and order presented without the use of literal words. This series of 35 prints encourages the reader to interpret the origin of these words, use as a puzzle, and to learn more about the illustrations/words picked. This book was presented at Moma PS1 Art Book Fair at Embajada Gallery in 2016. 

photo by Embajada. Booth D02 at Moma PS1 Art Book Fair 2016. 

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