Artist explores personal experiences, history Best of the Rest
Solo video exhibition specifically tackles how Guatemalan civil war affected Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa
A figure lies on his side, his head cradled in his arms, looking like he’s sound asleep.
He’s lying on a roughly assembled bed made out of layers of materials such as stuffing from a sofa, cushions, fabric and a frayed straw mat. He’s in a formal, European-style room. The soundscape is the calming crackle of a fire burning in a fabulously ornate, carved wooden fireplace. Its decorative elements include two cherubs blowing trumpets on either side of the word Volkenkunde, which is Dutch for the anthropological study of culture and society.
There are several things unusual about this sleeping figure. For one, all the hair on his body has been shaved off: his head, his eyebrows (not the lashes), his arms, his legs are all bare.
What’s also odd is that his skin is tightly wrapped with dark thread or cord. Scattered over his naked body are round, flesh-coloured upholstery buttons. The cord and buttons make him look like a human piece of furniture.
Is there a brief flicker of his eyelashes? If there is, it’s incredibly subtle. The dreaming figure looks content in his dream.
The haunting work is called Mimesis of Mimesis by Naufus RamírezFigueroa. It’s one of six video works being shown in the solo exhibition Requiem for Mirrors and Tigers.
Exhibition › Requiem for Mirrors and Tigers When: Feb. 22-April 21 Where: Grunt Gallery Tickets and info: grunt.ca
The exhibition is also part of the 2018 Capture Photography Festival.
In art, mimesis is often used to describe realistic depictions of the world. In the video, RamírezFigueroa is the dreaming figure. We see him dreaming and framed in a video that is itself dreamlike in its mixture of realism and uncanniness.
Mimesis of Mimesis was an original performance in 2016 in the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam. It was part of a series of works produced through a commission with Corpus and If I Can’t Dance.
Born in Guatemala City, Ramírez-Figueroa was part of a family involved in experimental theatre. He grew up during the brutal Guatemalan civil war that pitted leftist guerrillas, Ladino peasants and Indigenous Mayans against U.S.-supported government forces. The war ended in 1996.
Displaced by the civil war, he went into exile in Mexico and Vancouver, where he graduated with a BFA from Emily Carr. Despite leaving Guatemala, Guatemala hasn’t left him. The series of video works at the Grunt specifically explore the effect of the civil war on the artist.
Another work in the Grunt exhibition is Life in His Mouth, Death Cradles Her Arm. It shows the artist standing in the grave complex of Guatemala City’s General Cemetery. In his arms he holds a block of ice wrapped in a blanket that drips and dissolves. It looks like he’s cradling a child whose life is slowing draining away.
In writing about RamírezFigueroa, the artist Regina José Galindo said she liked almost all of his work because it was “puzzling and weird,” and challenging.
“I wouldn’t dare say that Naufus’s work is the colour of the tropics because he just doesn’t fit in any preconceived notion,” Galindo wrote in Bomb Magazine. “Naufus is Naufus, and he’s huge. He is a rainbow ranging from electric-carrot orange to the most melancholic shades of blue. He is luminous and dark. There is something that I can’t wrap my mind around, and I love him.”
BOMBHEAD When: March 3-June 17 Where: Vancouver Art Gallery Tickets and info:
vanartgallery.bc.ca
Bombhead takes its title from a collage by Bruce Conner of the distinctive A-bomb mushroom cloud as the head of a soldier. It’s the perfect image for an exhibition guestcurated by John O’Brian that explores the art of obliteration and destruction from the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 to the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011. FLOW: WORKS FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION When: April 14-June 10 Where: Surrey Art Gallery Tickets and info: Surrey.ca Among the works being shown in Flow is Val Nelson’s Rush Hour 2, a visual collision of a long line of traffic swooping down in an S curve into an elegant European interior. Also on view will be Brendan Lee Satish Tang’s Manga Ormolu Version 4.1-a, which is a mash-up of a Ming Dynasty ceramic with anime and techno robotics.
GERMAINE KOH: HOME MADE HOME
When: June 17-Aug. 26
Where: Richmond Art Gallery Tickets and info:
richmondartgallery.org
Not only are million-dollar homes now the norm in Vancouver, condos are getting smaller and more expensive. But how big — or small — should a dwelling be? Home Made Home explores the issue with a 175-square-foot mobile dwelling by artist Germaine Koh, along with conceptual micro-homes on panels by other builders and designers.
BEGINNING WITH THE SEVENTHS: RADIAL CHANGE
When: June 21-Aug. 12
Where: Belkin Art Gallery
Tickets and info:
belkin.ubc.ca
Radial Change explores bodies and what they represent through the work of choreographer and dancer Helen Goodwin. Works by Evann Siebens and Michael de Courcy in film and photography explore Goodwin’s choreography and her influence on the interdisciplinary art scene of the1970s.