Named after the thin strip of land that runs between Panama and Colombia, the exhibition situates the viewer within a history that stretches from European abstraction to the visual culture of pre-Columbian Peru.
Much as the Darién Gap links North and South America while acting as a cultural bottleneck between the two continents, this exhibition finds Ore-Giron examining the art historical legacies of the Global South and those of the Western canon side by side.
The paintings in this exhibition are the result of a transnational and transcultural approach to seeing and making. Ore Giron’s practice has been one of exploration and excavation, of bending time in such a way that the past floats to the present and the historical and contemporary find themselves in direct dialogue.
The works in Darién Gap are part of the continuing series Infinite Regress. Using flashe paint on raw linen, Ore-Giron fuses the visual traits of Peruvian goldwork with the refined geometry of Constructivism and hard-edged abstraction. The compositions seem to float above the substrate’s natural weave, offering a meditative, hallucinatory convergence of different eras and cultures. In the gallery, eight paintings surround the viewer to form a vista. With their forced two-point perspective vanishing along a horizon line, they draw the viewer into a retreating pictorial field. The resulting out-of-body feeling extends into feeling outside of ones’ time or place of origin, creating a transmigratory connection between the physicality of architectural forms and the celestial worlds referenced in the paintings.
About Eamon Ore-Giron
Eamon Ore-Giron (b. 1973, Tucson, Arizona) lives and works in Los Angeles. Ore-Giron received his BFAat San Francisco Art Institute, in 1996, and MFA from University of California, Los Angeles, in 2006. Hewas a member of the collective OJO, which was active from 2004 to 2013, with artists BrennaYoungblood, Joshua Aster, Justin Cole, and several others. He has exhibited and performed at theHammer’s Made in L.A. Biennial (2018); the Whitney Biennial, New York (2017); Ballroom Marfa, Texas(2017); LAXART, Los Angeles (2015); Prospect 3, New Orleans (2014); Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2013);Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City (2009); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2008); and LosAngeles County Museum of Art (2008), among others.
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