Work
Alexandre Arrechea made his name thanks to the art collective Los Carpinteros, composed of Marco Antonio Castillo Valdés and Dagoberto Rodríguez Sánchez. The three artists began working behind their collective moniker back in 1994, and they became rapidly successful. The New-York Museum of Modern Art acquired several of their drawings for the museum’s permanent collection. Alexandre Arrechea decided to leave Los Carpinteros in July 2003, to begin a solo career. His fist individual project was El Jardin de la Desconfianza (The Garden of Mistrust), an epic installation in Los Angeles that required two years of work (2003-2005). The central piece of the work was a whitewashed aluminum tree whose branches were outfitted with video cameras which recorded spectators and broadcasted them on the Internet. His public art often involves concepts of power and its network of hierarchies, surveillance, control, prohibitions and subjection. The spectator’s participation in the work adds to its contemplation.
For the 10th Havana Biennial (March 27 – April 30, 2009), Alexandre Arrechea worked on a project named La habitación de todos (The Room of All), which is a sculpture of a house that expands or contracts according to, respectively, the rise or fall of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Today, he works on a public art project in New-York, involving video projections on buildings.
His work will be showcased in the upcoming Venice Bienale.
Read more about this topic: Alexandre Arrechea
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“But it isn’t only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It’s more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of very emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it’s a half- love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“You should go to picture-galleries and museums of sculpture to be acted upon, and not to express or try to form your own perfectly futile opinion. It makes no difference to you or the world what you may think of any work of art. That is not the question; the point is how it affects you. The picture is the judge of your capacity, not you of its excellence; the world has long ago passed its judgment upon it, and now it is for the work to estimate you.”
—Anna C. Brackett (1836–1911)