Chinatown, New York
Alejandra Prieto
Monkey's Mirage
Y GalleryY Gallery is pleased to present Monkey's Mirage, the second solo show of Alejandra Prieto in our space. The exhibition features four new sculptures that dramatically reflect her continuing experimentation with mechanisms and raw materials (minerals)—as well as the symbolic significance of objects and their historical, mythical, or sociopolitical references. Mono con Navaja (Mulato Gil) is a low relief in stone depicting a monkey with a razor in its hand gazing at its reflection in a mirror. This sculpture was inspired by an 1816 portrait by Peruvian painter José Gil de Castro—Don Ramón Martínez de Luco y Caldera y su hijo Don José Fabián. In Castro’s painting, a boy carries a small round box with the image of the monkey that Prieto carved. There are many interpretations of the painting—all of them linked to the monkey’s ability to impersonate, or mirror, its possible relation to human nature. Also in the exhibit is a 1-meter diameter Ouija board with a hidden mechanical system attached to a computer. The software involves a search engine containing a series of keywords related to the works in the exhibition. The search engine accesses websites featuring the keyword. When a keyword is found, the Ouija reproduces the contextual sentence from the website next to the word. Alejandra has been working with mirrors and reproducibility since 2011 when she made her first coal mirror. For another work in her current Y gallery exhibit, she created a mirror made of polished pyrite pieces and resin bond. The work is related to similar mirrors from ancient cultures and deals with the misleading visual quality of pyrite (fool’s gold) that mimics gold. The fourth sculpture on view is made of molten and painted aluminum. It represents a closed system: two similar bodies shaped like animal stomachs are joined by two transversal conducts—one, evidently, a reflection of the other. The sculpture references a drawing from the book Mundus Subterraneus (1665) by Athanasius Kircher. This peculiar book, a lavishly illustrated treatise from the XVII Century, covers almost every subject that might relate to the earth. The works in this exhibition have a link to ancestral or primary source materials (paintings, religious or ancient objects, books), and they are all connected by a sense of illusory vision, virtual reproducibility, reflection or mirage, paradoxically represented through robust physical expressions. Alejandra Prieto (b. 1980 in Santiago, Chile) lives and works in Santiago. She attended PUC University for her BFA and Chile University for her MFA. She has shown internationally. Her work was part of the XI Imaginarios Sociales y Prácticas Artísticas, XI La Habana Biennale 2012; Projetaveis VII Biennale Mercosur, Porto Alegre, Brasil, 2009; El Terremoto de Chile I Triennale de Chile, Santiago, Chile 2009. She has participated in many group shows including but not limited to Provecto LARA in NC-Arte, Bogota, Colombia, 2013; Contaminaciones Urbanas, MAC USP, Sao Paulo, Brasil, 2010, among others. In 2011, she received the first CCU Art Prize in Chile and the Young Visual Creation Award of the Latin Union, in Paris, 2007. Prieto participated in the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP), NY; and the first edition of LARA, Latino-American Roaming Art, NC-Arte, Bogota, Colombia.