319 AIR – Exhibition Series / Fall 2021

Erasures and Accumulations: Lucia Garzón and Valentina Soto Illanes

September 3 – 26

Opening Reception: First Friday, September 3, 6–9PM

Valentina Soto Illanes, Such an ugly animal or one that is more useless, wood, cardboard, unfired red clay, 2020 (left) Lucia Garzón, Longer 1, video still, 2021 (right)

Grizzly Grizzly is pleased to announce our first artist-in-residence exhibit this season, which features the work of Lucia Garzón and Valentina Soto Illanes. In Erasures and Accumulations, Garzón and Soto Illanes activate the gallery space by drawing and installing directly onto the wall and the floor. When placed in conversation, Garzón and Soto Illanes’s work capture the intimate and the metanarrative dimensions of the immigration experience. In Garzón’s video performances, everyday gestures such as putting on socks and stacking books accumulate into an immigrant identity tied to the pride and exhaustion associated with manual labor under capitalism. Operating on a transhistorical scale, Soto Illanes’s ephemeral mural of unfired clay references--and alters--colonial manuscripts. The drawing will be wiped away with water at the end of the show, which reflects Soto Illanes’s interest in artmaking as an erasure of colonialist violence and water's dual role as a purifying and destructive force.

A Philadelphia-based interdisciplinary artist, Garzón spent their month-long residency in June developing a new series of experimental video-based performance work focusing on the immigrant histories and sacrifices made by the artist’s first-generation Italian mother and Colombian father. The work on view in Erasures and Accumulations mark Garzón’s return to the medium of video. Drawing an analogy between her artistic labor and the physical labor intrinsic to her family’s identity, Garzón’s video performances reflect the embodied, and often fraught, process of trying to fit into the molds of societal expectations for her intersecting immigrant and queer identities. Garzón states that the repetitive hands-on work that she employs in her artwork directly relates to her family’s occupations as woodworkers, chefs, and janitors. In the videos, Garzón performs repeated gestures to become bigger, stronger, and taller as though embodying the saying, “If my legs were longer, they might carry us further.” Garzón’s video performances both celebrate her family’s identity and how it is connected to resilience and manual labor, while also revealing the futility of striving to fit in within a capitalist society when one is forced into a repeated, and often inherited, cycle of work.

As the gallery’s February-March 2021 artist in residence, Chilean artist Soto Illanes explored working in unfired clay on a larger scale, and built a fountain that dissolved through the flowing of water. The resulting work was displayed at the Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia in May 2021 as part of Soto Illanes’s contribution to the University of Pennsylvania’s MFA thesis show. During the residency, Soto Illanes became further interested in the brittle and eroding qualities of unfired clay, as well as creating a drawing in motion by applying the clay directly onto the wall. Over the course of Erasures and Accumulation, Soto Illanes’s drawing will flake and crumble, resulting in a partial erasure of the original form to emphasize the unstable nature of objects and information.The sources of the drawings come from Historia general y natural de las Indias (General and natural history of the Indies), a 1526 text by the Spanish colonialist, historian, and writer Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, who created a taxonomy of the flora and fauna of America. Later editions of Oviedo’s text have featured different illustrations based on his descriptions, and these visual interpretations have changed the meaning of the volume over time. As Soto Illanes notes, the physical decay of the drawing echoes the instability and destruction inherent in the production and dissemination of knowledge, particularly during the age of exploration in America. The work’s dissolution is an invitation to consider the limits of representation and description, as well as the fraught legacy of historical documentation.

About 319 AIR: From January until August 2021, the five artist-run galleries on the 319 Building’s 2nd floor hosted artist residencies in their spaces. The pandemic had made it difficult to safely present exhibitions in our spaces, and at the same time, many artists were displaced from their studios due to the pandemic’s economic effects. Now that the galleries are reactivated, the artists are exhibiting works from their residencies in groups and pairs throughout fall 2021.

2020/21 Grizzly Grizzly programming and residencies are supported by Added Velocity which is administered by Temple Contemporary at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University and funded by the William Penn Foundation.

Artist Bios

Lucia Garzón is an interdisciplinary artist working in a range of different media including wood, textiles, print, and video. Garzón graduated from Tyler School of Art in 2018 with a BFA in printmaking. The main themes in her work focus on the immigrant values and various cultures that she was raised with and currently occupy. Garzón’s work has been exhibited in numerous group shows in the Philadelphia area. In 2019 she was awarded the Joseph Roberts Foundation grant and a solo show at Da Vinci Art Alliance (Philadelphia). Garzón has been an apprentice at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, a fellow at Soap Box Print shop, and will be attending Acre Residency in summer 2021.

Valentina Soto Illanes (1988) is a Chilean artist working mainly in sculpture and installation. She received her BFA from Universidad Católica de Chile (2011) and a Master of Fine Arts from Universidad de Chile (2015). Her work focuses on the concepts of nature and landscape, from their representations in media to the narratives of colonization behind them, invested in the power stories that permeate the ideas of nature and landscape representation. This research has led her to focus on relationships between art and nature, and the interstices between them, exploring the textures of the natural world. She has shown her work in exhibitions such as: De lejos se arma: ejercicios de recorte (Galeria BECH, Santiago, Chile), 15.01.15. (Galería D21, Santiago, Chile), Chronicles of the foreign (Galería Gabriela Mistral, Santiago., Chile), and Te llevo para que me lleves (Espacio Munar, Buenos Aires, Argentina). She has also been part of the residencies: Flora ars+natura (Bogotá, Colombia), R.A.R.O. (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Vermont Studio Center (Vermont, USA), and LabVerde (Manaus, Brazil). Valentina recently graduated from the MFA program at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, USA) and received the Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in 2020. She is currently working with unfired clay and ephemeral installations.