IF YOU GO
What: Interrogating Systems: 2008 Grants and Commissions ExhibitionWhere: CIFO Art Space, 1018 N. Miami Ave., MiamiWhen: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday to Sunday through June 22Cost: FreeInfo: 305-455-3380 or www.cifo.orgn Vídeo #15, Brazilian artist Almicar Lucien Packer sits on a chair inside the container of a moving truck. He's naked, and as the vehicle lurches forward, turns or abruptly stops, Packer and his chair are hurled into motion.
Ouch.
Packer's work, a two-channel video installation, plays on opposite screens in a dark room at the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) in downtown Miami, and it's the most provocative piece in Interrogating Systems, an exhibition of artwork created by winners of CIFO's 2008 Grants and Commissions program.
The 12 emerging and mid-career artists, all from Latin America, are chosen through a nomination and selection process that involves curators, artists and other art professionals. Some 300 artists were considered.
''There's an enormous amount of energy and creativity in these works,'' says CIFO curator Cecilia Fajardo-Hill. ``These artists are not indifferent to their reality. They are not cynical people. They are people trying to communicate ideas in a metaphorical way.''
The exhibition's title refers to the questions and transgressions involved in the works, and it's apt for art rooted in a landscape as volatile and changing as today's Latin America.
With Nowhere, a series of 150 small acrylics on wood, for example, Pablo Cardoso of Ecuador explores his country's geography, mixing painting with the technology of Google Earth and his own ground-level photography during travels to five remote points.
Viewing Cardoso's tiny acrylics, mounted on a wall in a way that deconstructs boundaries and creates a new personal geography, one cannot help but contemplate the recent bitter border conflicts involving Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela.
''I am interested in highlighting the thin line that divides reality from fiction, the document from invention,'' Cardoso writes in his mission statement. ``This project is an expression of my skepticism regarding our surrounding reality and the ways in which we understand it.''
Another interesting aspect of Interrogating Systems is that -- as involved as the artists are with new technologies that provide instant access to images -- the exhibit requires the presence of patient viewers willing to develop their understanding of the works.
In an age when you can examine the Mona Lisa more intimately on a computer screen than you can at the Louvre, Interrogating Systems tests modernity. Every piece is dependent on presentation. This is not a show you can appreciate via a website or capture in photographs.
The muted drawings of Black Opus by Johanna Calle of Colombia are impressive in the way they tenuously depict the weak structures that characterize Latin America's marginalized neighborhoods.
''She has dealt with the issue of poverty in a beautiful and poetic way,'' Fajardo-Hill says. ``She makes a completely valid and strong statement about poverty that is as powerful as any being made today in the international contemporary art scene.''
In Found Paintings, a series of photographic images flashed on a screen, Federico Herrero of Costa Rica explores how people use color in their neighborhoods -- color ''charged with humor and irony at the same time'' -- to claim their territory.
In one photograph, someone has painted a thick, blue line on a sidewalk; in other photographs residents use their houses or businesses as canvases for their creativity.
Herrera stakes his claim to prime real estate at CIFO with the exhibit's opening work, a lush blue mural dotted with black and white circles representing the artist's eyes, his gaze.
And then there's Packer, who taps into voyeurism in an effort to 'subvert and displace the common sense or `normal' use of objects [the chair], my body and architectural spaces [the truck's container].''
On one screen, Packer presents a frontal view of his performance inside the container; on the other, we get the simultaneous, rear view.
For a while, Packer and his chair, seemingly one, slide around the back of the container, often only precariously in balance. Packer works hard at staying in control. But on a wide turn, the artist (acrobat wannabe? fool?) is slammed against the container's walls. Then showing no emotion, his body like putty, Packer gets up. As if these were the most normal of circumstances, he returns to his position on the chair in the middle of the container.
And the torturous motion starts all over again.
