Uncontrolled Reflections - Installations, Videos and New Media. Published in MIX Magazine
Curated by Hugo Ares, Guillermina Buzio and Jorge Lozano at Shift Gallery, Toronto.
Uncontrolled Reflections is the result of stubborn tenacity and iron-willed passion – the best parents a media festival could have. The curators and the festival’s programmers, recall the early days when the festival wasn’t really a full thought yet, but rather a 1994 conference at the Harbourfront Centre. The conference proved what many already suspected – that the visual arts were growing within Canada’s Latin Community and needed to be brought to the forefront. The result was a 1995 Toronto-based Latin American Media Festival. Artist become gatekeepers and introduced members both from within and without the Latin community-straight, gays, aboriginals, Africans- to one another, highlighting similarities and uniqueness in unison.
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During those fertile underground years, the community regrouped, reorganized, and mapped out a new plan of action. The project evolved to include a creative community space and it adopted an independent inclusive format, whereby documentaries and other traditional genres mingled with themeless experimental works, offering new subjects and styles to its audiences. Artists became gatekeepers and introduced members both from within and without the Latin community. The Festival with its innate bold passion is now a worldwide event, with international creative exchange tours taking place in Latin America and Canada.
“Uncontrolled Reflections” brilliantly brings together seven Latin artists from countries as diverse as Argentina, Colombia, Canada, Spain, France, Mexico and USA.
These artists blend classical visual representations with new digital practices to create an ongoing dialogue between the narrative and the conceptual. For example; Oscar Muñoz’s “Re/trato” and “Narciso”, Gustavo Kortsarz’s “A los 40”, and Gustavo Caprin’s “Chamber Piece”, invite the viewer to challenge temporal and ephemeral images as the real and the virtual merge. Marta Cela and Tracy German’s “A scaled Down Universe”, and Claudia Bernal’s “Chamanika Urbana” as antiquated notions of modernity confront contemporary spiritualities. Ruben Ortiz Torres’s “The Manhattan Project” and “Estudio para un Muralismo virtual” use 3D design software to publicity morph virtual sculptures into unlimited representations.
So far, "Uncontrolled Reflections" is the most exciting exhibition this year’s at the Toronto media arts circuit. Well done!
