For New York-based artist Jonathan Monaghan, Extell works as a kind of conceptual sketch. A robotic voice tries to seduce us with promises of wealth and status, while the camera offers a view of a virtual Central Park, then leads us into a perfect, neat, impossible to inhabit apartment. The artifice eventually leads to | … |

There are people who are bridges: they are simply an undersea cable that irreversibly connects two geographies at the same time. Mauricio Ceppi is a visual browser that connects Caracas and New York, synchronizes your beats, harmonies consolidates, and manages to reconcile the two cities at the same bpm.   Mauricio was born in 1973 | … |

All progressive art protests the dominance of what has gone before‎. Staged incidents and riveting imagery evoke pressures and tensions with the vividness of‎ dreams and nightmares in POWERS SEEN AND UNSEEN [Poderes visibles e invisibles]. This international selection of recent moving image art, curated by Washington-based guest curator of Global Visions, Kelly Gordon, that highlights an array of‎ distinctive artistic strategies. Each cultivates awareness of “forces,” visible, invisible, exterior and interior. The exhibition designer is Gaëlle Smits.

In the case of films and videogames, we tend to take visual effects for granted, without truly understanding them as fictions. We don’t stop and say: ‘there’s a lens flare’ or ‘there’s a 3D animated character’, we just accept them. But when you give someone digital literacy, and they begin to know how those things are made, they start to see them differently –to really see them as fictions. In general, we go through life inhabiting spaces and using things that we have no idea how they’re made. I for one don’t understand how a computer works; it’s kind of a mystery to me. I guess I could read five books about it, but I probably won’t, so I just accept it. A person that works with me builds computers and has a deep understanding of how they work, so he doesn’t get angry and frustrated when they crash –he has power over them. Digital literacy, then, is about power: empowering people to not be just passive receivers.

Italian born, US based artist Federico Solmi’s two part solo show COUNTERFEIT HEROES [La fachada de los héroes] opens August 7 at G17 at Centro de Arte Los Galpones, Caracas, and September 10, at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del Zulia (Maczul) in Maracaibo. His work will also be featured in POWERS SEEN AND UNSEEN, a group show opening this Fall at Hacienda La Trinidad Parque Cultural, Caracas. ‎ These exhibitions represent the debut of the artist’s works in Latin America.

During a recent studio visit, Federico Solmi grabbed an old-school kids’ coloring book depicting American landmarks from his source shelf and remarked: «What always fascinated me about these coloring books was that they took complicated historical events and represented them to popular culture as pleasant, polished line drawings». Sorting through an array of the artist’s | … |

Can the world change in two minutes? Héctor Zamora’s O Abuso da História reveals a wild art performance that feels like it could be an odd, spontaneous protest riot. Various camera angles survey an elegant, old world Latin American colonial-vintage courtyard. Suddenly, large potted plants rain down, hurled from its windows. These crash to bits upon impact, remaining both living and near dead. The finale surveys the ambiguous wreckage while viewers experience a reflex to want to see all 120 seconds of the video all over again.

On April 14, we enjoyed the presence of Kelly Gordon in two key spaces for the study and experimentation of contemporary Venezuelan art: Hacienda La Trinidad Parque Cultural and Centro de Arte Los Galpones. We began the afternoon with the «Best of Best» workshop, imparted by the curator in charge of our year-long program Global | … |

Great news! Our program Global Visions: Insights into International Moving Image Art continues with the visit of its curator. After a successful first exhibition, we now welcome Kelly Gordon, moving image art expert and former curator of film and media at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum (Washington DC). Our guest will be in Venezuela from April 14 through | … |

Global Visions curator Kelly Gordon has written a text that contains useful questions to reflect on digital art, especially within the contemplative exercise of the solo show Focus: Jonathan Monaghan, which continues to be exhibited inside the Secadero 3 of Hacienda La Trinidad Parque Cultural. These approaches and interrogations come together as a sort of | … |

  NT: What are you going to show in Venezuela? JM: I’m going to be exhibiting a number of computer animated films, and they are going to be installed in various galleries spaces in Venezuela, and works are surreal explorations of power and commerce in the digital age.   NT: How has been your experience | … |

  “I’m very interested in the boundaries between what’s real and what’s virtual. I think in the digital age we have to be careful.” Jonathan Monaghan.     With a fluidity of mediums and meanings, artist Jonathan Monaghan (born New York, 1986) uses computer animation software and digital fabrication methods to create thought-provoking works that | … |

The evolution of cinema, video and new media in the context of visual arts has long been imminent, not only by their progressive occupancy of exhibition spaces, but because of the contents contemporary artists are choosing to explore in their works. The diversity and complexity of moving image art, along with its ongoing moment in contemporary | … |

Meet the artists invited by curator Kelly Gordon to be part of the Global Visions program: Jonathan Monaghan (USA), Héctor Zamora (Mexico), Federico Solmi (Italy), Matthew Weinstein (USA), Santiago Sierra (Spain).

«Global Visions: Insights into International Moving Image Art» is a year-long program unfolding throughout 2016, comprising exhibitions, talks, workshops and screenings in Caracas and Maracaibo, and aiming to explore our contemporary relationship with moving image art from an international perspective.

As you arrive at the show, you don’t know how to begin the tour: the images are all playing at the same time in the same place; all the senses are suddenly excited, searching for a cue to approach the work of one of performance art’s most important figures. For me, she is an obligatory | … |

The image of swallowing as a death drive is a poetics that has been around for less than a century. It is true that depictions of men around the banquet are as old as the Egyptian civilization. In the paintings found in the tomb of Nebamun (1400 B.C.)—perhaps one of the most important pictorial records | … |