Artist Talk: Juan Obando - Dirty South, North Star, Pirate Tropic

Tuesday, October 16, 2012 5:30 pm Patti and Rusty Rueff Galleries, Pao Hall Purdue University

ABOUT JUAN OBANDO:

Juan Obando has exhibited his work throughout the US, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, Colombia, and Venezuela. His work has been selected twice for Colombia’s “Salon Nacional de Artistas” and reviewed by different international publications, including the Madrid-based journal Artecontexto and the South African magazine Itch. He was recently awarded a 2012 Rhizome Commission for his MUSEUM MIXTAPE (Dirty South Edition) project, and in 2013 his project Cubeta will be a featured exhibition at Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna, Austria.

Juan Obando holds a BA in Industrial Design with a minor in Architecture and Urbanism from Universidad de los Andes, and an MFA in Electronic and Time-Based Art from Purdue University. He currently lives and works in North Carolina, where he is an assistant professor at Elon University in the Department of Art.

ABOUT THE TALK:

Juan Obando will talk about his latest production, focusing on two recently finished projects and one ongoing commission work. In 2010, Obando moved to North Carolina and was inspired to start exploring the political context of the area through a series of exercises relating to his personal experiences and to the bigger environment in which they were developing. This work was produced as a conscious decision to create work from scratch, under new rules—almost as self-assigned school projects. The strategies involved in this process include simulation, subtraction addition, substitution, superimposition and collage. This series will be presented for the first time in an upcoming solo exhibition titled “No. 1” at MIAMI gallery in Bogotá, Colombia.

In summer 2012, Obando was invited to be a resident at Casa Tres Patios (Medellín, Colombia.) His project ANTI-OQUIA consisted of orchestrating a public re-imagination of the Antioquia magazine, a local anarcho-philosophical pamphlet written and distributed by Colombian philosopher Fernando Gonzalez from 1946 to 1945. This event-based research explored contemporary literary forms and piracy as cultural dissemination using video, performance, and internet platforms.

Obando will also present an outline of his MUSEUM MIXTAPE project, which was recently granted one of the 2012 Rhizome (New Museum, NYC) Commission awards. In the following months, he will work alongside amateur hip-hop artists on creating a series of videos that aim to create a playful connection between hip-hop narratives and institutional art spaces. By inviting local rap artists to comment on contemporary collections in their respective locations and presenting these collaborations as an audiovisual series, Obando intends to offer a space to reflect on the current state of cultural economies, institutional community engagement and emerging subcultural forms and their intersections.