ART-PRESENTATION:Pia Camil

Pia Camil creates projects that negotiate between formal, historical and critical modes of operation. Formally, Camil’s works are often colorful objects, voluptuous fabrics, photographs or performances deeply related to items of domesticity, studies of the body, and have strong references to the legacy of conceptual art and modernism. Her works are critical of the exponential and irregular growth of Latin America’s capitals, and reference informal economies and the dynamics of merchandise distribution systems.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Queens Museum Archive

Pia Camil’s work uses textile, sculpture, and performance to create environments which confront the politics of global consumerism through the language of theater and retail. Recently, Camil has begun to recycle and alter textiles to reflect the larger socio-political forces which inform their production and distribution. In several of her works, hundreds of secondhand t-shirts with wildly different logos are sewn together into massive curtains that illustrate a shared cycle of consumption. Pia Camil for her solo exhibition “Fade into black: sit, chill, look, talk, roll, play, listen, give, take, dance, share”, has been inspired by the open-air markets of Latin America, particularly Iztapalapa in Mexico City, the artist comments on a cycle in which shirts designed in the U.S. are manufactured in Latin America or Southeast Asia, worn and discarded in the United States, and then sent back to Latin America to be sold again in second-hand markets. The highlight of Camil’s solo exhibition is “Fade into Black” (2018), a 104 meter long curtain of found t-shirts being shown in its third iteration. These T-shirts display numerous logotypes and messages and have been subjected to a transnational drift. Produced in countries like El Salvador, Honduras or remote locations in South East Asia, these garments travel north to be printed and distributed by corporations and brands. Sometimes sold, or given as event souvenirs, these shirts are discarded and then travel south, in bulks, where they are sold at street markets in many cities. This transit evinces an economical journey which is not exclusive to fabrics, and ends up in the dichotomy of people wearing logotypes and slogans dislocated from their immediate reality, advocating for causes which are not only foreign but completely unknown. Changing the direction of this geographical transition is a de-colonial impulse, as Camil reverts the destiny of these garments. Through a laborious fabrication process in collaboration with a local team of artisans, the T-shirts lose their status as secondhand objects and migrate to a different one: that of art. The work is being shown as a nearly 360 degree viewing experience that will transform the Queens Museum’s central atrium into a place of repose for museum visitors. In a classic pairing, the second-hand jeans of “Bluejeaneando” (2019) join the t-shirts under the museum’s skylight. Like the t-shirts, the denim sculptures import culture and memories with them into their new role. Pia Camil was raised in Mexico City. She earned a B.F.A. in 2003 from the Rhode Island School of Design and an M.F.A. in 2008 from the Slade School of Fine Art, in London. Camil returned to Mexico in 2009 and formed the band El Resplandor with musician Esteban Aldrete and actress Ana José Aldrete. To heighten the effect of their incantatory music, Camil dressed the trio in tunics, ponchos, and veils that she crafted out of vibrantly colored and printed textiles. Her paintings often took sculptural form, drawing from such disparate sources as graffiti and artist Frank Stella’s minimalist geometry. The weather-worn hues and accidental shapes of peeling billboards in and around Mexico City inspired “Espectacular” (2012- ), an series of suites of large-scale paintings composed of hand-dyed and stitched textile strips. The artistic process romanticized urban decay and offered a critique of mass production. Camil’s later work dissolved the boundary between the viewer and the work on view. For “Wearing-Watching” a commissioned art fair project for Frieze New York 2015, she handed out 800 ponchos. The concept recalled Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica’s “Parangolés” (1964-79), in which visitors donned capelike paintings in the gallery, but Camil gave, rather than lent, the art to her participants and encouraged them to take selfies and post the images on social media. “Skins,” her first solo U.S. exhibition, opened in 2015 at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, and featured slatwall paneling (inspired by Stella’s “Copper Paintings”)  from which she hung cloaks as well as shelves that displayed small ceramics. Camil rooted her 2016 installation, “A Pot for a Latch”, at New York City’s New Museum, in an act that involved barter. One month prior to the opening of the exhibition, at her invitation, the public exchanged “objects of power, of aesthetic interest, and of poignancy” for a sweatshirt (from a limited edition of 100) that she had designed in collaboration with Mexican actress Lorena Vega. Visitors brought in random items, and each object was stamped with a logo. Camil then mounted the assemblage on wire grid walls. In the course of the exhibition’s run, visitors were allowed to swap items for those that were already on display.

Info: Queens Museum, New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, NY, Duration: 6/10/16-6/2/20, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 11:00-17:00, queensmuseum.org