HOY SPACE: Xavier Cázares Cortéz’s SUDDENLY WE HAD nothing
HOY Space
February 11 to April 27, 2012
Opening Reception: Feb. 11, 5 to 7 p.m.
California-based artist Xavier Cázares Cortéz’s artwork is featured in the HOY Space, a new project gallery at the Vincent Price Art Museum. In Spanish, Hoy means “today” or “nowadays,” and fittingly, the HOY Space features artists who address current and active contemporary topics in their work and whose practice may extend across media.
Cortéz’s large-scale installation SUDDENLY WE HAD nothing consists of a densely collaged wall-based work. The piece examines the multiplicity of meaning within language. Through a non-traditional process of acquisition, the artist constructs a seemingly nonsensical assortment of images that enact the type of information overload we encounter in everyday life. Acting as a type of social anthropologist, Cortéz collects everything as tokens of our cultural propensity for accumulation, and creates from them a contradictory arrangement in which order/disorder and novelty/banality collide.
SUDDENLY WE HAD nothing mixes the classification strategy of natural history display and the hyper-real world of commercial slogans. Faced with this excess of visuals, the viewer may interpret meaning from the installation’s jumbled and chaotic rhizomatic networks. Cortéz cites the field of signs and symbols, known as semiotics, as an inspiration for this piece as well as his previous works.
