Adriana Lara

Modern Painters – December 2007/January 2008

As part of the magazine’s second annual “Introducing” section.

In 2003 Mexico City–based artist Adriana Lara was invited to take part in an international group exhibition about mapping, titled “GNS (Global Navigation System),” at Palais de Tokyo in Paris. For her contribution, she decided to ask artists, writers and curators, including “GNS” participants, about times when they discovered that an idea they thought was theirs turned out to be not so original—when they had encountered an existing work that embodied their brilliant concept. From these responses, she drew a world map tracing the routes of an idea’s (imaginary) travel, with no distinction between origins and end points. A line joining Paris and Mexico City, for example, indicates the location of an artist and the place where she found an idea’s double, but without showing which is which. living in one of these cities and the place where he or she found its cognitive double. The project, which Lara titled simply Ideas, ignited a number of international conversations about artistic production and originality.

Lara’s work is preoccupied with systems; it exemplifies a wider tendency away from object making toward research and her method reinforces the still underacknowledged fact that artistic production is always collaborative. Unsurprisingly, she refuses to confine herself within artmaking’s traditional bounds. In 2003 Lara confounded the curatorial team Perros Negros with Fernando Mesta and Agustin Ferreira; their projects include a series of exhibitions mounted in 2007 under the auspices of Galería Sentimental, a parasite-like gallery temporarily formed within the space of Galería Comercial, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Lara also edits Perros Negros’s art ‘zine Pazmaker (in both title and format a citation of the Parisian Pacemaker, published by the similarly minded curatorial office Toasting Agency). Her band, Lasser Moderna, combine Latin cumbia and electronic music; their first release featured a cover designed by artist Carlos Amorales.

In Ideas Lara traces invisible vectors of thought and social relations; in Nuevo Archivo de Arte Público (New Archive for Public Art) (2005), she creates an atlas of fake public art. This Web-based project consists of a fictitious cultural institution responsible for documenting and interpreting postwar public art in Mexico. Most of the NAAP’s records use marginal sites as source material—a minimal brick part table, a ball-court mural, a broken yet legible billboard—and with them the artist makes catalogue entries assigning false names, dates, and descriptions to pointed effect: nominated as art, these neglected spaces regain at least hypothetical value and the promise of a new community that might take shape around them.

Lara’s installation 380° (2007), presented as a recent solo exhibition at Galería Comercial, builds on her interest in mapping while also moving in directions at once personal and cosmic. The piece comprises a number of spherical sculptures, some resting on pedestals or tripods and others suspended from the ceiling, that resemble a 3-D diagram of a planetary system—but a diagram that has been exploded. No orbital patterns organize these globes into a coherent universe; 380° is, perhaps, the artists first self-portrait, making metaphoric the network of relations that she has created over the past five years.

Art and cosmos, gallery space and universe, commerice and the big ban: the allusions in 380° are all-encompassing ones that can simultaneously mean everything and nothing. It is in this territory that Lara’s work exists, amid contradiction and ramifying complication in the precariously balanced realm of ideas.

–Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy