October 10, 2008, Cycles, tattoos, beer and sweat, By Edward Swift, Looking at oneself, Theater of confined space, An hour with Frida, By Thomas M. Verich, Ph.D., Marco Arce presents paintings and sculpture, Learning to see anew, By Fernando Senior

Cycles, tattoos, beer and sweat
By Edward Swift October 10, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Art Opening
Testosterone
New paintings by James Harvey
Sun, Oct 12, noon–3pm
Galería Juárez
Jardín Juárez 4
Mineral de Pozos
045 (468) 103-7923

For many visitors to San Miguel, the unique terrain, temperate climate and open vistas can be a strong draw for outdoor activities. A few weeks of hiking cobblestone streets can give you a sense of confidence that makes you want to test your mettle on some tougher terrain outside the safety of the city.

James Harvey’s paintings of the French soccer team in the nude were exhibited last month in the Casa de la Cultura in Celaya. This month his latest work can be seen in Pozos, appropriately titled “Testosterone,” a series of paintings of motorcycles, crushed beer cans and muscles adorned with tattoos and sweat. He has painted the inner machinery of motorcycles in such a way as to suggest a dissected body. Tools used for making repairs are strewn about as if a mad surgeon had been at work and suddenly abandoned the operation for little more than a six-pack.

The style of the painting is loose, suggesting speed, recklessness and power driven by unbridled passion.

With broad, fast brush strokes he has painted crushed beer cans in such a way as to suggest the lingering aroma of stale beer and damp cigarette butts while his canvases of muscles loaded with tattoos bring to mind a modern tribal bonding of males for the sake of maleness.

The motorcycles are poised for action. They glitter and gleam, and although they are without riders, you can easily picture the kind of rough trade that might propel them down the road. For many people motorcycles are a symbol of danger, power, life on the edge and raw rough sex.

For others, the motorcycle is a symbol of arrested development. For me, the motorcycle is a bad dream. When I first came to San Miguel, I bought a big Honda. On the day I purchased the bike, I had two accidents on the streets of San Miguel. I cracked a rib, broke another and suffered bruises from head to toe. I sold the motorcycle as fast as I had fallen off it and I have never ridden another one since. So it is hard for me to look at Harvey’s motorcycles and think of anything except the sensation of spinning out of control, falling and landing on hard cobblestones while cars are whizzing by. It is difficult for me to get worked up over two wheels but most people are not like me.

Recent visitors to Harvey’s studio in Fábrica La Aurora were ooohing and aaahing over the paintings as if they had been taken up in rapture.

I stood to one side and listened to them, both male and female, squealing and grunting in such a way that could be interpreted as obscene—of course, I would never make that judgment myself. All said and done, the paintings are provocative and demand a response. And they will surely receive many. You can bet every biker for miles around will attend the opening. Incidentally, the French soccer team also will be on exhibit, so if you missed them in Celaya, you have another chance to see them in Pozos au naturel.

Edward Swift was a charter member of the notorious Chelsea Gym in New York City.

Looking at oneself

Art Opening
Verse a sí mismo
Fri, Oct 10, 7pm
Sala de Arte Mexicano
Bellas Artes
Hernández Macías 75

Part of the Festival Internacional Cervantino, the exhibit “Verse a sí mismo” includes photographic self-portraits by 60 artists from six different countries. As the show travels to other countries the collection will continue to grow, 10 new artists from each country.

With their variety of expressions, angles, techniques and gazes the self-portraits seem to ask to be contemplated with the same honesty their creators had to face when they interrogated themselves, before a mirror, about being an artist in today’s world.

Theater of confined space

Art Opening
Paintings by Helio Montiel
Fri, Oct 10, 7pm
Sala Principal, Bellas Artes
Hernandez Macías 75

Helio Montiel began his career in the 1980s, part of a group including Francisco Castro Leñero, Irma Palacios, Germán Venegas, Sergio Hernández, Roberto Turnbull, Roberto Parodi and Gustavo Monroy, among others.

Like them, Montiel’s major interest has been reinterpreting the iconography of the cultural and popular visual tradition.

The 11 paintings in this exhibit all depict the narrow space of his own studio. Into this confined landscape the artist places a combination of objects and people that give the canvases a sense of theater, mixing the mundane with the magical.

On a past visit to San Miguel I noticed the opening of an exhibition devoted to Frida Kahlo. Despite the near ubiquity of her image on wearing apparel, shopping bags and folk art objects, somehow I resisted the appeal of a primary source experience.

Fortunately, this summer I went ahead and visited “The Heart of Frida,” an exhibit of Frida Kahlo’s secret letters and drawings installed in a spacious, sequential gallery at Jesús 36.

There, in four distinct rooms, are displayed a cache of 37 letters, notes and postcards written by Frida Kahlo, as well as six drawings executed by her.

All of theses items were contained in a traditional laquered box from Michoacán inscribed with the letters “FK” on the outer lid, and “Coyoacán, Frida Kahlo 1950” hand-printed on the inner lid. The box is approximately the size of a small tea chest.

An unanswered question of the exhibit is why Frida Kahlo chose to retain these intensely personal and apparently spontaneous responses to some of the major forces in her life.

Whatever her motivation, there is no denying that all these ephemerata document her volcanic relationship with her husband, Diego Rivera, her abiding faith in revolutionary communism and her struggle with constant physical pain amazingly well.

The gallery arrangement of the exhibition leads visitors to well-mounted enlargements of all the letters and drawings with text provided in both the original Spanish and in English translation.

The materials are also arranged thematically, with sections on “Frida and Diego,” “Frida’s Politics” and “Frida’s Pain and Decline.”

While the relatively small number of letters notes and drawings may suggest a lack of depth, this is far from the powerful reality of these emotive and evocative documents. Surprises abound. Kahlo’s Picasso-esque deconstruction of Rivera as a toad is stunningly done on an ordinary piece of lined notebook paper. The amphibian image of Diego is revisited in several additional drawings and notes. Kahlo’s political drawings invoking the names of her Communist heroes ranging from Marx to Mao are another surprise. She even drew a funeral bow to commemorate Stalin’s death in 1953. More poignantly, she also drew, in black and red, a painful interpretation of an x-ray of her spinal column, an injury that “not even homemade glue could restore.”

In the last gallery space visitors can see the originals found in Frida Kahlo’s mysterious treasure box. Apart from quirky drawings made on the backs of losing Mexican lottery tickets, these are largely unassuming, letter-sized pages, accompanied by equally nondescript hand-addressed envelopes.

Nonetheless, these are spectacular 20th-century documents of an artist whose influence and importance continue.

As a former university curator of special collections, I have dealt with significant collections of literary and historical manuscripts, letters and documents, but I have never encountered a more impressive concentration of materials than Frida’s secret cache.

Marco Arce presents paintings and sculpture

Art Opening
Marco Arce
El conejo y la cara enojada (The rabbit and the angry face)
Part of Festival Internacional Cervantino
Sat, Oct 11, 7pm
Kunsthaus Santa Fe
Santa Fe 22A
Colonia Allende

Marco Arce was born in Mexico City in 1968. He studied with Gilberto Aceves Navarro from 1988 to 1989, and since 1987 he has participated in more than 60 collective exhibitions and 15 individual ones. Arce was granted a scholarship by the program “Jóvenes creadores” from FONCA (National Fund for Arts and Culture) in 1990–91. From 1995 to 2001 he lived in New York City, then he returned to Mexico and received another scholarship from FONCA for 2002–03. He was part of the National System of Creators for the period 2004–06. He has received six acknowledgments and two awards in national biennales. Arce’s work is in the collections of the Carrillo Gil Museum, MARCO Monterrey Museum, Natasha Gelman Collection, Jumex Collection, Deutsch Bank Collection and Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo, among others.

Inspired by his personal story, the exhibition includes paintings and sculptures. The pieces are constructed as a chain of complex unions and disunions, coming from all type of realities, especially of virtual and dreamlike realities in which symbols are mixed with life experiences, feelings and emotions.

The show will remain open until November 30.

Learning to see anew
By Fernando Senior

Workshop
Contemplative Photography
Fernando Senior
Mon, Oct 13
LifePath Center
Recreo 80
Register: 154-8465 or 154-4542

How often have you seen others or experience in yourself a moment where you are looking, but not really seeing or noticing? Hearing, but not really listening? Reacting to events rather than choosing to act consciously?

In his book Full Catastrophe Living, Dr. John Kabat-Zinn reminds us that mindfulness, which is a moment-to-moment awareness, is cultivated by purposefully paying attention to things we ordinarily never give a moment’s thought. He describes it as a systematic approach to developing new kinds of control and wisdom in our lives, based on our inner capabilities for relaxation, paying attention, awareness and insights.

Mindfulness practice is often associated with meditation, such as silent sitting or walking. The truth is that every moment, from washing our hands to driving a car and throwing out the garbage, allows us the opportunity to observe and make conscious choices that will nurture the seeds of happiness in ourselves and in others.

Tich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen master, reminds us of these ordinary moments with the following poem to guide us when answering the telephone or making a call:

Words can travel a thousand miles.

May my words create mutual understanding and love.

May they be as beautiful as gems,

As lovely as flowers.

Yet another appealing, entertaining and educational approach to cultivating mindfulness is through the popular art of photography. After all, what better way to faithfully and impartially document what we are actually able to see (or fail to see)? What better way to use a camera than as a tool for personal growth?

The term “contemplative photography” is used to describe a type of art that evokes or invites the viewer to experience a contemplative moment documented by a photographer. But more importantly, we can also use the term as an invitation to any individual to use his/her camera as a loyal companion in an intimate exercise in mindfulness. In other words, contemplative photography combines the practice of meditation with the art of photography.

If you were to make an appointment with yourself to exercise your ability to see anew, you will surprise yourself at all you will really see, even in your own hands, living room or back yard. I invite you to choose to find peace when your eyes only want to see retribution, to find joy in the midst of pain and to find beauty where there appears to be none. Doing so gives you a choice of the type of world you wish to see and live in.

Visit www.themindfuleye.com for additional information.
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