Hunter College
Life as Activity: David Lamelas
On Now:
Nov 3, 2021 → Dec 18, 2021
11.03.21 → 12.18.21
ISLAA Artist Seminar Initiative
ARTISTS
David Lamelas
CURATORS
Harper Montgomery
Sarah Watson
Re’al Christian
ART MOVEMENTS
Conceptual art

Curated by Harper Montgomery, professor of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art with Sarah Watson, chief curator, and Re’al Christian, Lazarus Graduate Curatorial Fellow, and with MA and MFA students enrolled in the curatorial practicum seminar The Transgressive Itineraries of Conceptualism. The exhibition has been developed in close collaboration with David Lamelas, who worked with students via Zoom on both projects during the course of the pandemic, from spring of 2020 through the fall of 2021.

Life as Activity: David Lamelas marks the artist’s first solo show in New York in more than a decade. For over half a century, Lamelas (b. 1946, Buenos Aires) has made work that pushes the boundaries of contemporary art by defying conventions of artistic media. Although he is globally recognized as a ground-breaking figure of conceptual art, his explorations with the spatial qualities of film and the signifiers of identity have not been adequately investigated. Life as Activity focuses on Lamelas’s experimentation with film and his examination of identity and narrative fiction in light of his ongoing insistence that his artistic practice has always, in one way or another, been grounded in his sense of himself as a sculptor.

The exhibition brings together sculpture, film, and photography made across many decades and locations to center this aspect of Lamelas’s artistic practice. These works include two key sculptural installations he made in Buenos Aires in 1966 and 1967, Situación de cuatro placas de aluminio (Four Changeable Plaques), a moveable configuration of aluminum sheets, and Limit of a Projection, a spotlight in a dark room; a series of ten photographs shot in London that pose as film stills for a non-existent movie, The Violent Tapes of 1975; and two films, The Desert People, a pseudo-documentary about a road trip to a Native American reservation which was shot in Los Angeles in 1974 and The Invention of Dr. Morel, a film based on the Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares’s novel The Invention of Morel (1940), which was filmed in Potsdam, Germany in 2000. Both films will be screened on an ongoing basis at set times, which will be available on the Leubsdorf Gallery website. Showcasing the ways in which Lamelas makes us aware of how the stories we tell ourselves are shaped by encounters with space and time, all of these works invite us to participate in scenarios in which container, contained, observer, and observed become blurred.

The exhibition Life as Activity: David Lamelas is part of the ISLAA Artist Seminar Initiative at Hunter College. Additional support for Life as Activity: David Lamelas is made possible by Joan Lazarus, Gagosian Gallery and the James Howell Foundation in support of the Advanced Certificate in Curatorial Studies, and by the galleries’ sustaining supporters the David Bershad Family Foundation, the Susan V. Bershad Charitable Fund, Inc., Carol and Arthur Goldberg, the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation, and the Leubsdorf Fund.

Installation Views

Installation view of ten black and white photographs by David Lamelas in a linear arrangement on a white wall.
Installation view of vitrines with archival photographs and documents.
Installation view of a white-walled room with a ceiling-mounted light creating a bright circular shape on the floor.
Installation view of a vitrine with archival photographs and documents.
Installation view of a video projection in a dark room.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
David Lamelas

David Lamelas (b. 1946, Argentina) is a key figure in the history of conceptual art and experimental film. Comprising film, video, performance, photography, sculpture, installation, and drawing, his complex practice excavates the viewer’s perception and critically assesses the mechanisms of cultural production. Central to Lamelas’s oeuvre is the notion of time and what people make of it. His work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions, includingDavid Lamelas, Extranjero, Foreigner, Étranger, Ausländerat the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, and the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2006), andTime as Activity: David Lamelasat the Hunter College Art Galleries, New York (2021).

ABOUT THE CURATORS
Harper Montgomery

Harper Montgomery has written for theArt Bulletin,Art Journal, and theBrooklyn Rail, and has organized exhibitions on art of the nineteenth century, the twentieth century, and the present for the galleries of Hunter College. She is the author ofThe Mobility of Modernism: Art and Criticism in 1920s Latin America(University of Texas Press, 2017), which won the Arvey Foundation Book Award for distinguished scholarship on Latin American art, and coeditor ofBeyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic(Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013). Her current research had been supported by a senior Dedalus Fellowship and concerns the ascent ofartesaníawithin contemporary art spaces in Latin America from the 1970s to the late 1980s.

Sarah Watson

Sarah Watson is the Chief Curator of the Hunter College Art Galleries.

Re’al Christian

Re'al Christian is a writer, editor, and art historian based in Queens, NY. She is a contributing editor atART PAPERS, and the Assistant Director of Editorial Initiatives at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. Her work explores issues related to identity, diasporas, media, and materiality. Her essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared inArt in America,Art in Print,BOMB Magazine, andThe Brooklyn Rail. She has written catalogue and exhibition texts for CUE Art Foundation, DC Moore Gallery, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., and Performa, and has participated in public programs with Dieu Donné and the Rubin Foundation. As an editor and Curatorial Fellow at the Hunter College Art Galleries, she has worked on exhibitions and publications includingThe Black Index(2020–21), which addresses the history of Black self-representation as an antidote to colonial violence, andLife as Activity: David Lamelas(2021), a survey of photography, video, film, and sculpture by Argentinian conceptual artist David Lamelas that explores the constructed nature of identity across geographies. Christian is an MA candidate in Art History at Hunter College with a focus on twentieth-century Latin American art, and holds a bachelor’s degree from New York University, where she double majored in Art History and Media, Culture, & Communication.

The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) supports the study and visibility of Latin American art.
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The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) supports the study and visibility of Latin American art.

Tue–Sat: 12–6 PM Sun–Mon: Closed
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