San Miguel artist installs airport multimedia spectacle
By Lulu Torbet November 28, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Art Exhibition
Rearview Mirror
Michael Wiebach
Nov 13–Dec 31
Exhibition Center
International Terminal 1
Mexico City Airport

More than four million air travelers, making their way through the neutral territory of the Mexico City Airport as they move from Point A to Point B of our fast-moving world, are expected to pause for “Rearview Mirror,” an ambitious multidisciplinary exhibition by Michael Wiebach of San Miguel.

They are sure to be captivated. This visual and aural feast consists primarily of two elements: a group of 13 large oil and encaustic paintings, and six installations that combine vintage travel-related art objects with video and sound.

“Rearview Mirror” is not tethered to any specific place, but rather examines the context of “the voyage” itself.

Subtitled “Coming and Going Between Yesterday and Today’s Transportation,” this integrated body of work speaks to the issue of our high-tech world of travel and its connection to a bygone sense of time and the journey. It connects the obsolete object or experience which now triggers our nostalgia, to the soon-to-be-obsolete object of high-tech progress that will end up as non-biodegradable landfill.

Highlighting the means of transport, rather than the journey itself, the exhibit takes us to a past when we went to the airport to watch the planes land and meet friends and family returning from distant ports; when we heard the nighttime train whistle in the distance as we nestled in bed; when we peered through a ship’s porthole to behold an infinite sea. “Rearview Mirror” recaptures for us the sense of movement, of being in motion, between our home and our destination.

In what is both a provocative and playful spirit, the artist employs the juxtaposition of the travel-inspired toys and objects that fascinated us, and that now bring back memories of leisurely, highly anticipated journeys, with the sense of impermanence and displacement of our impersonal modern airports and terminals—“non-places,” in the artist’s words—to bring into focus their unacknowledged sociological and psychological impact on us as travelers.

The paintings depict airplanes, cars, semaphores, boats and trains—many of them vintage toys from the artist’s youth, or that of his father (the artist still has his father’s electric trains, in operating condition). In one of the multimedia pieces, “The Plane is Flying,” a metal airplane from a child’s carnival fair ride is suspended against a wall on which moving clouds are projected.

Installed inside a free-standing cubicle in the exhibition hall, “Porthole” features an imposing antique ship’s porthole, mounted in a wood frame. A rear video projection shows the rolling sea through the porthole, as if the ship were in motion. The see-sawing horizon and the constant changes in the clouds create in the spectator a sense of both suspension and the queasy onset of seasickness.

The most ambitious installation, “Elevation,” is located in the atrium of the exhibition center. The spectator stands on a glass floor, looking through to the floor below, which is covered with 5,000 white paper airplanes, onto which is projected a film of moving clouds.

Moving clouds also are projected around the four sides of the atrium on eight video screens, in a continual sequence from one to the other. The effect is to give the viewer the illusion of being seated in an airplane—in other words, a sensation of elevation, or ascension.

Michael Wiebach was born in Mexico City. Educated in Mexico, the US and Germany, he has had dozens of exhibitions in these countries, and in Japan. He keeps his treasured back issues of National Geographic in a half-century-old refrigerator.

Four new artists in Pozos 

Art Exhibition
Fri–Sun, 11am–5pm
Galería Juárez
Jardín
Mineral de Pozos

Lately it seems a week does not go by without something happening in Mineral de Pozos. This week is no exception. On Sunday, Galería Juárez unveils their first group show, introducing four other artists to Pozos, along with the familiar works of Mary Breneman and James Harvey.

Edina Sagert is well known in Mexico and France for her stunning watercolors and engaging art classes. For this show she has ventured from watercolors and produced a series of encaustic and oil paintings on canvas. Some of them are figurative, some of them are abstract—all of them are strong and interesting.

Patti Bess will show her work in Mexico for the first time. Her large-scale kitsch saints, with titles such as “Saint of Misspent Youth,” are a nod to the plethora of religious art in Mexico, but with a contemporary twist.

Karl Gerzan’s art of the people for the people brings us familiar scenes that we all encounter each day while walking the streets. Through his eye they become brilliantly executed works of art.

Lastly, Pedro Urquiza presents his colors of Mexico. He is a successful Querétaro architect who spends his weekends painting in a way that the necessary precision of his profession will not allow. He claims to paint only to please himself and the passion shows in each piece.

Galería Juárez is open every Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 11am–5pm and is conveniently located on the main Jardín. 

Art trumps retirement
By Lou Christine

Art Exhibit
Dr. Fernando Herrera Rosales
Tue, Dec 2, 6pm
James Pinto Gallery
Instituto Allende
Ancha de San Antonio 20

Retired pediatrician Dr. Fernando Herrera Rosales at 90 is far from inactive. He splits his time these days as a sought-after professor of art history at Instituto Allende and in his studio creating art from plastics. He dedicates time and energy interpreting his molds and then shaping them into art. 

Dr. Herrera continues to inspire his students, offering and showing ways to showcase plastic. Since retirement, he has arranged 17 exhibitions for his students and shown his work at galleries around town. Dr. Herrera continues to inspire and produce plastics and construct thought-provoking images while employing new and old techniques he has mastered. His keen focus, in his ninth decade, is to dedicate himself as an artist and professor, and to be part of the well-respected San Miguel artistic community.

A special inaugural exhibit is scheduled for December 2, on the grounds of Instituto Allende. Free admission; complimentary refreshments served.