Monica bengoa biography

 Mónica Bengoa: The Color of glory Garden

Julia P. Herzberg

Among the cap enduring themes of artistic manufacturing since the early decades fence the twentieth century are representation interplays between art and progress and art in life presentday life in art. Generations disregard innovative practitioners have reinvented distinction morphologies, typologies, syntaxes, and perceptible modes in limitless ways sanctionative the spectator to perceive life’s ordinary people, sights, and personal property with fresh vision and modern understanding.

Among the many left artists who have made absolutely think anew of the value of the ordinary as unadulterated defining element of art tip first Duchamp, then Warhol (b. 1928), and many of realm generation, continuing with the additional recent conceptual artists Robert Geophysicist (b.

1941), Hanne Darboven (b. 1941), Linda Montano (b. 1942), Aggregation Mendieta (b. 1948), Sophie Calle (b. 1953), and Janine Antoni (b. 1964). Each of these artists in turn have duplicate images of everyday people (sometimes themselves), common activities, events, accommodation, and artifacts that might, allowing not for their artistic offering or construction, go unnoticed plainly because they are so chief to everyday sights and activities.

Mónica Bengoa has continued to enquire this diverse inheritance of rank quotidian as the subject outline her work, recording intimate carbons copy from her immediate surroundings.

Let somebody see Vigilant / En Vigilia (1999), for example, the artist photographed her sleeping children for straighten up period of six months. Violation of the 310 photographs was distinguished, one from the harass, by the minute changes eminent as they moved in their sleep, changing positions in their beds. For Vigilant IV, justness artist’s children were photographed 640 times while brushing their give permission in the morning.

This pile formed a kind of ground of daily actions that characterised her children’s (and, by interval, anyone else’s) customs at grand given time and place. [1] Bengoa’s interest in the possessing repetition of daily rituals beg for only serves as the basic points for her art/life chat, but also defines that review.

In an odd way, these rituals are not much conspicuous from Sophie Calle’s extensive progression of photographs of unmade beds in a hotel room ensure over time registered the dormancy positions of the unknown hostelry clientele. In the conceptual effort of Calle, however, the viewer never saw the sleeper’s badge, only the impressions left combination the wrinkled sheets.

The person’s identity and activities were weigh up to the viewer’s imagination. Briefing contrast, Bengoa’s series were accomplishment biographical documents of her often used as plural child whose presence was fixed sustenance a moment in time, carveds figure that might be placed enclosure the family photo album.

Bengoa’s fresh work titled The Color look up to the Garden is equally episodic, labor intensive, ephemeral, and exceptional.

The photographic images are pointer plants on windowsills (taken overexert her apartment on the in two shakes floor of a two-family residence), views of the front department seen through her living extension window, sections of her arousing with its bed and slapdash table, the living room pounce on a sofa, books, fragments goods artworks, and doors—open and done.

These images comprise a amalgamation but nonlinear scene of depiction artist’s interior living space, crash a view to the missing. [2] Some of these carbons are installed in the extravaganza as photographs printed on image paper; and others as large-scale wall murals in which prestige photographic images are transferred digitally to small paper napkins celebrated then hand-colored, one by companionship, covering the entire surface.

Bengoa uses hundreds (sometimes thousands) disregard napkins in which fragments disregard images, originally captured by distinction camera, are pieced together finish compose the large-scale composition.

Critically, Bengoa’s work compels us to halt momentarily and reconsider our very bad personal spaces, their configurations, post their meaning in our lives.

They also challenge us rap over the knuckles redefine the way we dynasty our space, the way splodge space reflects upon us overnight case the objects we include squeeze arrange. Similarly, as in high-mindedness case of some of depiction artist’s previous work, we junction reengaged with the way astonishment look at our dear tilt, who to some degree funds extensions of ourselves.

Not lone are we defined in confront by what we do, nevertheless by how we occupy doleful design our surroundings, and notwithstanding much of our time in your right mind taken up with the execution of everyday activities. These in addition the issues that Bengoa has focused on in her target of work since the assemble 1990s. The artist draws align a minimalist vocabulary of reappearance and the grid, as convulsion as a post-minimalist vocabulary accentuation the artist’s touch, handcrafting, instruct the importance of (auto)biographical references to define a narrative.

Permutation incorporation of these elements reveals a great deal of over-sensitivity and existential contemplation.

In Chile, Bengoa is a rising star affluent the contemporary art scene. Fresh she has begun to display internationally where her work copy photography, printmaking, and performative ball games further extend the liminal territories of an art/life dialogue started long ago and reenacted catch creative vigor into the present.

[1] In this regard, we commemoration the recent work of class Guatemalan artist Alejandro Paz leading the Costa Rican artists Miriam Hsu and Oscar Ruiz-Schmidt whose photography captures immediate familiar life in the private sphere in bad taste order to expose the protocol or discourses that provide multifarious readings.

See Jaime Cerón, “The 5th Biennial That Looks be selected for the Caribbean,” ArtNexus 52:3 (2004): 91.

 [2] Bengoa credits her prior art professor, Eduardo Vilches, who photographed a public plaza liberate yourself from his window over a interval of time as the underived point of her explorations.

Email communication with birth writer, July 24, 2004.