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Manipulation: Jellyfish Colectivo

L Gallery
Curated by Community Curator Ramon Cardenas
February 5 - April 16, 2021
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Additional Virtual Content Below

Manipulation is a site-specific installation commissioned by the Rubin Center. In this new series of works, Juarez-based Jellyfish Colectivo transform the L-Gallery with trademark imagery and visual animations painted and projected directly on the walls alongside mixed-media sculptures and expressive large-scale paintings on canvas. In the process they create an immersive environment full of color that evokes a multitude of impressions inviting the viewer to decipher its meanings.

Jellyfish Colectivo consists of Atenas Campbell, Pilo Portillo, and Kukui Herrera. Established in 2010 in Cd. Juárez, their work includes murals, paintings, digital illustrations, animations, and sculptures of abstract creatures, characters, and animals, with hand scrawled words in their particularly colorful and graphically bold style. The unique combination of the stylized and the realistic, the magical and the everyday, is influenced by their life on the border where things are not as they seem and the things you see mask hidden truths or lies. Manipulation is curated by Ramon Cardenas, Rubin Center Community Curator.

 

A row of vague face stares back at you, Emotionless.
Multiple sets of eyes fixated on your every movement.
The image taken from a photograph and manipulated,
altered until unrecognizable, to a point of no return.
Shades of sequencing colors and contrasting tones,
symbols and icons forming pictograms.
Simple reminders that you are under surveillance.
A drop in the bucket in a vast desert bleeding dry.
Feliz Viaje.

 

Manipulation: Conversation with Community Curator Ramon Cardenas and Pilo Pida of Jellyfish

Rubin Center Community Curator Ramon Cardenas in conversation with Pilo Pida, lead artist of Jellyfish Colectivo discussing the collaboration and the creative process behind their new site-specific installation, Manipulation. Produced in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Pilo talked about challenges and changes that have affected their art practice due to isolation, as well as themes presented in the exhibition and their cross-border artistic practices.