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Yvonne Venegas |
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The Most Beautiful Brides of Baja California is a series of photographs documenting Yvonne Venegas’ immersion in the daily life of her once childhood friends. After having left Tijuana to pursue her studies, she returns to explore their lives and daily reality as women from bourgeois background. The artist captures what they have become, fifteen years later after her departure. Venegas spontaneously photographs them in everyday environments, such as family gatherings, ceremonies and marriages. Both documentary and familial in nature, these photographs appear as diverse reactions of individuals faced with their own appearance. As a study of appearance Venegas employs unconventional documentary photography that exists between pose and gesture in this study of everyday beauty and melodrama. In presenting a perspective of the wealthy and leisurely life of these Mexican women, the works also offer a critique about social inequalities existent in Tijuana.Yvonne Venegas’ exhibition is presented in collaboration with Photomathon - an organization dedicated to the promotion of work by young, emerging and culturally diverse photographers, www.photomathon.com. The Bikini Project consists of 294 images of photo album snapshots of women in bathing suits, collected over the past forty years by an unknown collector. The album was found adrift in Howe Sound, BC by log salvager Erik Hammond in the summer of 2002. This unique collection was later donated to the artist, Heather Passmore, who has re-contextualized it through its presentation in the gallery space. Each picture and any notes that appear on the back of the photo are projected onto the wall of the gallery, one by one, in a continuously looping large-scale digital slide show. Each image hovers for a few seconds before gradually fading into the next. All the images feature familiar poses of women on the beach, whether among friends or alone. The presentation of the photographs in this manner raises various considerations with regard to representation, archiving and authorship. Moreover, this collection of images generates further questions about the real lives of these women, their vulnerability and their stories beyond the captured images. |
| Las Novias mas hermosas de Baja California Rachel Teagle (Curadora del Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, San Diego, CA, EUA) Yvonne Venegas usa la fotografía como un método de crítica social y de autoexploración. Su proyecto Las novias más hermosas de Baja California (2000-2004), lo inició como respuesta al trabajo de su padre, uno de los fotógrafos más importantes de bodas de sociedad de Tijuana. El retrata a las familias pudientes de la ciudad y las presenta en un “mundo perfecto.” Fotografía las mismas bodas, despedidas y cumpleaños que su padre, pero desde la perspectiva documental, centrándose en momentos equívocos en los que sus personajes dudan entre producir gestos reales y adoptar poses socialmente aceptables. La fotografía de Yvonne Venegas, aborda la clase social, que al tratar a Tijuana (desde Tijuana)— encontramos un espacio único con una estructura social distinta de las de los Estados Unidos y de México. La preposición desde, que puede indicar origen, también implica lugar, tiempo y un punto de vista personal, todo lo que describe de forma apta la interacción íntima de la obra con la ciudad. Venegas estudia a Tijuana desde una lente de clase. Su obra internaliza la convicción del sociólogo francés Pierre Bourdieu de que la función y el significado de la fotografía son inseparables del sistema de valores implícito en una clase social. Al igual que Bourdieu, Venegas cree en la autoridad que tiene la fotografía de afirmar procesos generalizados de formación social que deben ser entendidos a través de sus manifestaciones locales. Sus estudios de dinámicas grupales en fotografías como Encendedor, 2000 y Todas listas, 2001, hacen mención a la complicada noción de clase en Tijuana. Mientras que otros artistas enfatizan la hibridez cultural del lugar, entre la permisividad de la cultura californiana y las restricciones de la tradición mexicana, Venegas revela una reacción social en contra de la fluidez que define a tantos otros aspectos de esta sociedad transnacional. Sus personajes, lugares y eventos recurrentes revelan la insularidad de las clases altas de Tijuana. |
| The Most Beautiful Brides of Baja California Rachel Teagle (Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA, USA) Yvonne Venegas approaches photography as a method of social critique and self-exploration. Her ongoing project, The Most Beautiful Brides of Baja California, began three years ago in response to her father's work as one of Tijuana's society wedding photographers. He portrays the city's wealthy families in a "picture-perfect" world. She shoots the same weddings, showers, and birthday parties from the perspective of a documentary photographer-focusing on moments of equivocation when her subjects hesitate between revealing an authentic gesture and adopting a socially acceptable pose. Yvonne Venegas' photography, on the other hand, is both of and inherently about class in Tijuana-a unique place with a social structure distinct from both the United States and Mexico. The Spanish term desde, loosely translated as from, with its implication of location, time, and personal point of view, aptly describes her work's intimate interaction with the city. Her previous photography-composed portraits of stereotypical Tijuana characters such as, wrestlers, vaqueros and hustlers-ascribed to a more straightforward documentary approach. Now, Venegas studies Tijuana explicitly through the lens of class. Her work internalizes French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's conviction that photography's function and meaning is inseparable from the implicit system of values maintained by a social or economic class. Venegas illustrates Bourdieu's belief in photography's authority to affirm generalized processes of social formation that must be understood through their local manifestations. Her studies of group dynamics, seen in photographs such as Lighter and All Ready, speak to the complicated notion of class in Tijuana. While other artists emphasize the cultural hybridity of the city perched between the permissiveness of California culture and the constraints of Mexican tradition, Venegas reveals a social reaction against the fluidity that defines so many other aspects of this transnational society. Her recurring characters, events and places speak to the insularity of Tijuana's upper-classes. |
BIOGRAPHIES: Heather Passmoreinvestigates aspects of class stratification and cultural hierarchies by experimenting with different materials. Passmore obtained a Bachelor and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia. Solo exhibitions include:Bikini Project, Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond;In the Kitschy at Maple Ridge Art Gallery, Maple Ridge, and The Odd Gallery, Dawson City. Group exhibitions at various galleries across the country include:Modern Fuel, Kingston, 2008; The Khyber, Halifax, 2007; Artspeak Gallery, Vancouver, 2005; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, 2005; Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Vancouver, 2004. |
mexican art, arte, artistas, mexico, galeria, museo