Art & Theory: Panorama from the Bridge (Traveling Artists) – Part 3 of 3 by Rodrigo Alonso

11.08.2000

 

 

Art & Theory: Panorama from the Bridge (Traveling Artists) – Part 3 of 3

by Rodrigo Alonso

 

 

 

TRAVELING ARTISTS

 

For several years now, Margarita Paksa has chosen to immerse herself in the uncharted terrain of numerical images. Even before her video installation Tenis, she used a computer screen saver as a «ready made» for her video El Descanso de Loreta (Loreta’s Rest). Paksa became fully involved in working with digital support after a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts. The results of her investigation into all these mediums are displayed in her solo exhibition at the Ruth Bencazar Gallery in Buenos Aires. It reveals the extent of her commitment and involvement with analyzing the unknowns that arise from the combination of different symbolic universes within the matrix of electronic representations.

 

The discursive impact of her work is paralleled only by the videos and performances of Marcello Mercado from Córdoba. With a very savage slant within the limits of visual sadism, Mercado investigates recent history to nourish his critical and uncompromising tone as he questions the contemporary human condition. After his early videos such as El Vacío (The Emptiness) or Restos de Madre (Remains of Mother), Mercado entered the Internet with Sections of Nothing-Nothing, a less than encouraging look at our reality, in which historic and cultural symbols appear as parts of an unsolvable puzzle…{+}