Error is Chance

I remember the first time I saw blue shadows, light-diffused shadows on snow. In the warmer and brighter tropics shadows are a strong dark or a well-defined black.  I arrived in Toronto in early March, still winter, and everything was foreign to me, but soon I realized that I was the foreign one, not the other way around. All my contextual understanding was displaced; the places were strange, the people, the gestures, the interpretation of those gestures, the manners, the language, the weather….and also the concept of beauty.

 As an architect, this was a big discrepancy, and at the time almost an impediment to understand and accept the nature of the city. Toronto’s beauty is not obvious, like it is in cities like Paris, Prague or Rome; it can escape you if you are not paying attention.

John Cage once said that “the highest duty of the artist is to hide beauty”. This phrase did not make sense to me at first. Learning through the life of the big masters:Brunelleschi, Donatello, Mies, Rodin… my position had always been the complete opposite, for me, the highest duty of the artist was to find beauty where no one else could see it. Why would you purposely hide beauty? Maybe,I thought, because to make it more meaningful it had to be displaced from the surface, from the realm of appearance to the one of content  so the objects of art could talk about desires, believes, memories, conflicts, faith, history…and in doing so would acquire meaning relative to the way we experience them. I saw Toronto under this new light.

I realized I had to hear what the buildings, the streets, the parks, the benches… had to say, except that, at the time, Toronto was a blank canvas, it did not say anything to me yet, everything just looked the same, brown, and empty… but it contained the hope of finding something new and better than what I have left, so I gave it a chance,I started filling the blanks.

Of course communication became the first obstacle. The language was a barrier, but not for too long, and the fact that Ruth will always be ‘Ruz’ and not ‘Root’, is something one just have to learn to live with! But the untranslatable, the gestures, the hidden meaning of verbal and non verbal expression was a real challenge. As well as trying to explaining why the weather was the least of my worries when immigrating to Canada, meant understanding the absolute ignorance that posing such question implies.

( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/world/americas/23venez.html)

But to be fair, I did not know much about Canada either, so I illustrated my interrogators, to the best of their abilities, and also demanded answers that would help me explain properly what I could only guess and guess wrong (because my logic did not work anymore). My facts were right but my conclusions, my interpretations of the facts, were wrong…I needed translation.

Estrangement was not new to me, I have always been an outsider but this time I was a guest. In a battle between rejection and acceptance I had to both redefine the known and to make the unfamiliar familiar. Fortunately architecture has its own language... and that language I knew.

Slowly, the buildings, the streets, the parks, the benches…  started talking to me, the buildings talked to me about immigration, religion, acceptance,political struggle, separatism, longing from imperialist  past, hippies turning into snobs, porn into clean trash, capitalism, social concerns. 

The immense amount of parks and the almost negligible amount of plazas and benches talked to be about congreagation laws, about fear, society, public virtues and private vices, the importance of appearances... The signs talked to me about cultural clashes, about resistance, cultural identity.

They city told me what people did not…and through them I understood the meaning of silence,subtlety, the negative behind every indirect answer, the fear in the absence of answer…how unaccustomed they were to this living intensity….

Soon, the brown in the east seemed to me distinct from the brown in the west, the emptiness did not bother me as much as before, and the sameness in the surface was not the same any more.  My “wrong"was not as wrong…my “interpretation errors” at first my biggest nightmare became my comparative advantage, because did not hold the weight of only one point of view, I did not know or believed in how things were suppose to be...

I had no context, no status,no pretensions…I did not know what things HAVE to be I only could think on the million of options they COULD be. And I could hear one different  voices around me, each one coming  from a different place in the world, telling me a different way….

Error became a chance.A chance to hear, to see, to talk, to feel and understand….to create.It’s not been easy,  ..and I have walked alone for so long that is hard to believe that other way its possible, but I wake up every day thinking that maybe I am mistaken and another error will give me an unexpected chance to be the stranger I should be.

POINTS OF DEPARTURE

“The artist simply has to portray the world as he sees it. His power to change it is commensurate with the clarity and sincerity in the way he places himself within the picture”

Vik Muniz in ch. 6 Crystals, Grains, Dirty negatives from Reflex

My life has been guided by the simplest encounters with real or unreal characters in books and movies that contrasted an imposed solitude created by dangerous surroundings and a protective family that used the house as a fortress. As Montaigne wrote, only solitude can train the soul to survive loneliness and in those days and still now I travel with my mind to the places I only know by written or visual description.

In points of departures nothing is clearly defined and yet you are moved.

The 6 pictures of this exhibit have names such as Mitte or Charlotte, clues that tell you very little about precise location and  yet they provide a vague idea,  a sense of place.  The grain, texture and the tone make you wonder if they were taken recently or a century ago. You get closer to check if they are actually pictures in watercolour-like paper or paintings or if, as in Swann's Way, we are given pictures of paintings to add an artistic layer to the mechanical reproduction.

A look at the pictures bounces back as a thought, a memory, a place-not quite like the one portrayed-but yet outlined by the diffuse traces, the gestural marks in the print.

Like the Invisible cities described by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan, you realize that the story told by the images is completed by you, as a viewer, in a dialogue where the eyes are not the ones commanding the story, but the mind.

Contemplating these images, in solitude, there is no loneliness as they are an invitation to travel, to construct a world and that city that only exists in the space in between. They are just a point of departure for each one of us to find the best possible reality and “the invisible reasons which make cities live”. 

Unexpected

My little stranger made me happy

With all his kindness, I do not deserve

In this world of darkness

God bless the gestures of all the strangers

The hopes they foster

The smiles

Who am I?

And what are they to realize what I cannot say

The” wants”  that made me act like someone else

Anatomic Work

Mix Media: Computer Render,Photography,Oil paint on x-ray July 2006,  Lennox Contemporary Gallery

Fascination with the human body, with God supreme creation, has always been part of Art and ergo of science, since dissection has been the most common method of anatomic study and learning.
Although much is written about difficulties of artist in obtaining cadavers for dissection- with some local exceptions- it was an accepted practice by both, religious and civil authorities, for the purpose of legal and scientific investigation. In fact in De Sepultis (a 1301 papal bull) Boniface VIII instructs the boiling of flesh and bones of the  Crusaders for easy  transportation, allows their dissection, prohibiting only the dispersal of parts (for easy reassembly in the Day of Judgement).

The first publications appeared in the XVII century in spite of numerous anatomical studies done by Da Vinci, Michael Angelo and Rosso Fiorentino, and others. Their link to art was due not only because of their use to design, painting and sculpting but also because it was through the hands of the illustrator that the anatomist could communicate its findings and avoid the natural feeling of revulsion and pain provoked by the image of dead matter. 

In other words, the role of the illustrator was to transform the macabre, dismembered and decomposed biological matter into a pleasing and coherent image that could be used by scientist as well as artist. Or this reason De Humanis Corporis Fabrica and Epitome of Andrea Vesalius, was one of the most influential and copied publications of the XVII century.

By the XVIII century the roles of anatomist, illustrator and print maker were ambiguous.

This interdisciplinary collaboration proved to be an essential in the development of both science and art.

Historically the relation between Architecture and Art has been very tight, and even with science, particularly in areas related with the knowledge of the human body. 

Nevertheless, afterward with the discovery of X-rays and other non-invasive exploratory techniques such as MRI, CATscan, etc the connection between Art and Science weakened or was rendered un-necessary.

In the contemporary world both, the production of meaningful spaces and the close relationship that once existed with Art and Science has been weakened by a tendency to neglect or numb our senses, and by given priorities  merely to the functional aspect of the architectural profession, reducing it to mundane 'construction'.

As an architect that has worked in Art and has been constantly exposed to medical science since infancy (both my parents are doctors: neurology and surgery), my work has been looking to re-establish this connection by using also modern techniques of artistic representation and scientific exploration; thematically, playing with dualities such as: natural and constructed landscapes, the rational and the imaginary, and the perception of scale, etc.

Petri Dish + Clams + Translucent Images + Light + Base

w/Gaston Soucy,Dr.Plaido Mora &Dr. Rut Mora Izturriaga

For MEASURE (art party) We worked  with the formal repetition of natural and man made patterns, using images from cities, landscapes and human body parts (particularly brain cells) calling the attention  on the outstanding formal resemblance and the dramatic scale differences.
The piece resulted in an illuminated object that by using Petri Dishes and translucent images referred to a microscopic sense of scale. Playing with this assumption, the sense of scale was broken or displaced when the content was, on the contrary macro-scale image such as an aerial picture of  cities, landscapes, etc.
Comparative statistics were place at the base

X-PORTRAIT Skull #1: x-ray + oil + wood + plastic + light

Illness makes us much more conscious of our body, its functions, its power and limitations. The pain, the anxiety, the uncertainty created by it produces an immediate awareness of fragility and puts in perspective what we many times overlook.
On 2008, after going for a minor surgical head intervention, a friend –the patient-handed me two x-rays of his head (side and front) and asked me to do an ‘X- Portrait’.
Since we have worked together in the past with cities, wounds, and body parts I created two images that reflected these experiences; playing between hard and soft geometries, rational and organic shapes, natural and constructed landscapes.

Horizon Variations

(after Max Richter)

Summer 2010-Mary Kim & Ruth Mora, poem with 2 hands

In the thick of the night, the white rabbit licks

in the moon he is just a shadow

in the wild tobacco, aromatic, shy,opens up

while we look outside to our land

Overgrown with last winter's languor

is the hope of finding something new

in spring's shadows

a smile is brighter than the sun

birds flock in your eyes

when the blue shadows are turning black

the remnants of yesterday's dream conspire

to make me happy again