Project for a Memorial
Oscar Muñoz has been making photo-based conceptual works for the last decade. Bringing the highly poetic, intense and evocative Latin American ethos to concept work, Muñoz explores post modern notions of identity--personal and socially constructed. In both the works in The Disappeared exhibition, the images morph in and out of existence. The ethereal and fleeting quality exist as the artists' signature mark and as experience itself.
A metaphor for the whole exhibition exists in the work of Oscar Muñoz’s Breath. Only when the viewer comes close enough to breathe on the steel disc, does the face become visible. The viewer's breath brings life. Only through paying very close attention can one both see and know. Through their art, these artists fight amnesia in their own countries as a stay against such atrocities happening again. And through their art, they ask us, as Americans, to question what role our own country played in supporting the Latin American governments which killed their own people as a matter of course. The forces of evil are as indebted to those who chose not to know as to those who chose to forget.
His newest work, Project for a Memorial is based upon drawing. The artist quickly sketches the image of a face but even as he finishes it, it begins to fade into nothingness. Each screen houses a different face in different phases of appearing and disappearing. |
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