Pia Camil

No A Trio A

source: piacamilme

The performance is a negation of Yvonne Rainer’s “Trio A” coreography highlighting the difficulties and problematics of engaging with an iconic work. There are 50 meters of fabric which travel through out the space, the fabric is fastened onto my body with a harness (in the fashion of bondage) and I wear a mask and wooden platforms with the intention to limit my vision and movement. Attempting to do the performance becomes a real effort, the performance in the end should be only that, a series of attempts.
The installation was made for La Casa Encendida, Madrid, with artist Guillermo Mora and the suit was designed in collaboration with Uriel Urban.
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source: you-ads

Diplômée de la Rhode Island School of Design et de la Slade School of Fine Art de Londres, Pia Camil est une artiste visuelle développant une approche corporelle décalée de l’architecture et de notre relation à l’environnement. Brouillant les distances entre public et privé, l’artiste, née en 1980 à Mexico, propose dans sa performances, No A Trio A, une négation du Trio A de Yvonne Rainer, chorégraphiant la problématique de l’engagement. Cinquante mètres de tissus occupent l’espace, reliés à l’artiste à la manière d’un bondage, qui évolue dans l’espace portant des chaussures plateformes en bois et un masque. Limitée dans ses mouvements, l’artiste doit poursuivre la performance et développer des stratagèmes pour se déplacer. L’œuvre a été présentée à La Casa Encendida à Madrid, avec l’artiste Guillermo Mora, en collaboration avec Uriel Urban.
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source: piacamilme

Pia Camil was born in 1980 in Mexico City, where she continues to live and work. Her work has been shown in Mexico, Colombia, France and the U.S. Camil received her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from The Rhode Island School of Design in 2003 and her Master’s of Fine Arts from The Slade School of Fine Art in 2008. In 2009, she formed El Resplandor, a performance-based band. She has received awards including the European Honors Program, Palazzo Cenci, Rome, Italy in 2001 and she was nominated for The Paul Hamlyn Award, London in 2008. Camil’s work is in the permanent collection of La Colección Jumex, la Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and the Wattis Museum amongst others. Her solo exhibitions include “The little dog laughed” at Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, “Entrecortinas: abre, jala, corre” at OMR Gallery, Mexico City, “Espectacular Telón” at Sultana Gallery, Paris, and “Cuadrado Negro” at the Basque museum-center of contemporary art in Spain.

Through her work Pia Camil has shown a proclivity to failure or the decaying associated to the mexican urban landscape, aspects of modernist culture and traces of art history. Her practice has explored the urban ruin – including paintings and photographs of halted projects along Mexico’s highways (highway follies); abandoned billboards that become theatre-like curtains therefore theatricalizing failed capitalist strategies (espectaculares), or the problems and contradictions that arise when engaging with iconic art works (No A trio A or Cuadrado Negro).
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source: saatchigallery

Pia Camil’s objects are never quite what they seem, meaning that they are almost always misunderstood. The artist draws from the symbolic universe of contemporary consumerism, incorporating the signs, objects and things that form part of everyday life. Compelled by the failures of capitalist strategies, Camil’s performance objects propose a friction between non-linguistic representation and modernist symbols. The domestic warmth of her sensuous ceramics, textiles and interiors are merely a veil for a practice that is better aligned with the hard-edges of New Mexico’s urban vernacular architecture and post-industrial ruins. In her wide ranging practice, Camil trawls highways to reclaim abandoned structures and thereby activates spaces of intervention to uncover the aesthetics of failure.

Paradoxically, the artist’s attraction to the physical qualities of craft techniques has never been one of romanticising laborious processes. Camil is more interested in the intrinsic usefulness of craft forms as cultural signifiers, with meanings rooted in both feminist and materialist histories. Massive hand dyed wall hangings, elaborate ponchos and glossy ceramic vases, suggest a theatrical staging of an interior world. These objects have been props in Camil’s live performances that experiment with the formal qualities of domestic spaces. Often presenting multiple objects within the same room, the artist is known to have rearranged objects to activate a cyclical conversation. Blurring the space between exhibition and set design, Camil leaves the spectator to conclude his or her own reading of these interactive set-ups between inanimate objects.

Camil’s practice enacts possible ‘other’ functions for the dissemination of visual art (theatre, architecture and advertising to name a few). While her reuse of billboards as a promotional form highlight the failure of the commercial system, the notion of consumer culture draws attention to the spectacle of an art form centered on objects and things. Ever disarming, the tropical colour themes (cream, tan, blue, and purple, with brighter accents of yellow, red, and peach) offset the linguistic fragments of her ceramic series (Fragmento, 2014), which are as self-aware as their audience. Camil’s work is a consistently inquisitive attempt at making and re-making objects; be it performing a ‘negation’ of a work by the American choreographer Yvonne Rainer, resituating the Russian supremacist Kazimir Malevich’s black square in three-dimensional public space or her incessant reordering of fragments. The convergence between discrepant urbanisms and aspects of modernist culture form a site for the articulation of failure as a means of reinvention.
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source: galeriaomr

Mexico City, Mexico, 1980.
Lives and works in Mexico City