ART CITIES:Los Angeles-Pia Camil

Pia Camil draws inspiration from the urban landscapes of Latin America, engaging with the history of modernism to create paintings, sculptures, performances, and installations. Often using laborious fabrication processes in collaboration with local manufacturers, the artist decelerates the frenetic pace of mass commodification with handcrafted production, as evinced in the intimate quality of her work.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Blum & Poe Gallery Archive

Pia Camil’s work takes a critical approach to modernism’s legacy, exploring themes such as US-Mexico relations, the politics of consumerism, and the invisibility of feminized labor, often articulated through imagery from the Mexican urban landscape. Recently with emphasis on the importance of collectivity through public participation, she explores these territories through performance, painting, installation, sculpture, and film. Camil’s latest exhibition, “Nidos y Nudos”, was created during a pandemic-prompted uprooting from Mexico City to the rural countryside. Precipitated by the stark contrast between one environment and the next, Camil spent the last year looking to nature for lessons in collective intelligence and the building of symbiotic architectures. What results are two new bodies of work, “Nidos” (Nests) and “Nudos” (Knots). The ten works on view from the “Nidos” series are organic totem-like forms of concrete, mortar, and recycled newspaper in bright pigments. Camil’s sculptures explore the concept of the nest, focusing in particular on the termite nest as one of the architectural wonders of the living world—this body of work is a meditation on its labyrinthine design and its symbolism. The termite nest is built by the collective action of workers in a colony, a swarm intelligence that creates elaborate structural motifs that allow for efficient ventilation and temperature control, yielding mounds 300 times bigger than the insects themselves. Continuing with Camil’s signature leitmotif of transforming mass-market, used, and recycled materials, these structures are coated with a mixture of cement and newspaper. The irregular surfaces contain small “windows” to peek into, to glimpse a moment from everyday news with particular points of views and stories, creating a connection between object and viewer. These works are a post-pandemic rumination on the nest as protector, enclosure, and incubator for the seed of a species. Presented alongside, the sister series “Nudos” is comprised of works on paper with coiling, overlapping lines of ink and vibrant oil stick over hand-smudged locally sourced clay. Informed by calligraphy, storytelling, and multispecies feminist theorist Donna Haraway’s book “Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene” (2016), Camil’s drawings channel Haraway’s concept of “sympoiesis, or making-with” rather than “autopoiesis, or self-making”. The drawing patterns suggest pathways or messages made by termites during their daily activities. These forms reference collective creation but also the act of getting tied up, like hands in a cat’s cradle—another reference to Haraway’s string figures-symbolizing a speculative fabulation.

Info: Blum & Poe Gallery, 2727 S. La Cienega Boulevard,  Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 17/7-14/8/2021, Days & Hours: by appointment only (book here), www.blumandpoe.com