Close Distance
By Leah Triplett
A small crowd formed outside the Mills Gallery at about ten minutes before 6 p.m. last Friday night, anticipating the opening of Close Distance, a multimedia group show of six Boston-area emerging Latino artists. Curated by Liz Munsell, a curatorial research associate in contemporary art at the MFA, Close Distance purports to elucidate the nuances of North and South American cultural exchange in the construction of identity. While each of the six artists included in Close Distance range in media and method, all observe the implications of the everyday on the production of Latin American self-hood
There are several strong pieces in Close Distance, which deserves the attention it received by gallery goers Friday night. Among them are Daniela Rivera’s Fatiga material and Ricardo De Lima’s There is always a crack/That’s how the light gets in. However, likely to be overlooked is Raul Gonzalez III’s Quien fue la numero uno? (And the number one was?). While Rivera’s piece guides viewers through the space and De Lima’s video anchors them, Gonzalez’s Quien fue la numero uno?occupies just a small corner to the left of the gallery entrance. In this piece, Gonzalez paints faceless female heads, gendered only through meticulous hairstyling, directly on stained bedsheets in an almost cartoon-like fashion in commemoration of women factory workers who’ve been murdered in Juarez, Mexico. According to the wall text, hundreds of women have been murdered in Juarez since 1993, their identities only known now to those who loved them. Gonzalez’s use of the bed sheets references this intimacy, while seemingly mitigating (and simultaneously calling attention to) this pain of loss through the casual, ordinariness of anonymous, cartoonish imagery. This use of cartoon imagery to understand the horrors of political violence on everyday people is augmented by Dave Ortega’s comic, Abuela, available for free to Close Distance viewers.
Close Distance is on view at the Mills Gallery through August 28, with an artist and curator talk on Wednesday, August 3 from 6-9 p.m.