ZONAMACO 2024
Your Content Goes Here MEXICO CITY, MEXICO Booth C104 Feb 7-11, 2024 MATERIAL RELEASE Material Release is a four-artist exhibition, in where Youdhisthir Maharjan (1984, Kathmandu, Nepal), Kerry Phillips (1974, Denton, Texas), along with Tony Vazquez-Figueroa (1970, Caracas, Venezuela) and Jerónimo Villa (1990, Bogotá, Colombia) each alchemize ordinary items into storytelling monuments of assemblage. The collective highlights the artists’ ability to liberate their materials, transforming object, purpose, and utility past the natural understanding assigned to their mediums. The expansive nature of the works in this curated exhibition challenges viewers’ confines of imagination in the transcendence displayed by the artworks on view, approached with varied nuances. Maharjan calls attention to the power and beauty of words, using books as readymade objects, obscuring, or redacting text and sculpting a renewed understanding of storytelling through this practice. Phillips repurposes discarded household materials, fabrics, and mementos imbued with nostalgia causing a pause of reflection in the stream of a fast-paced society dependent on abundance and known for disposability. Vazquez-Figueroa creates a personal archive of paintings, sculptures, objects, and installations, that form a collective memory in his unique transformation of resin. Villa amplifies the tension between purpose and pointlessness through the physical and visual metaphors created by his choice medium, refining used sandpaper, matches, natural woods, and the likes of. Across Material Release, intentionality becomes the common thread as the visceral presence, textures, smells, and memories that accompany each work create an interconnectedness between artist, viewer, and object. Material Release es una exhibición, en la cual Youdhisthir Maharjan (1984, Kathmandu, Nepal), Kerry Phillips (1974, Denton, Texas), junto con Tony Vázquez-Figueroa (1970, Caracas, Venezuela) y Jerónimo Villa (1990, Bogotá, Colombia), alquimizan elementos ordinarios para así convertirlos en monumentos narrativos de ensamblaje. El colectivo destaca la capacidad de dichos artistas para liberar sus