Fritzia Irízar
Mazatlanica
On what grounds do we ascribe value to certain materials? What sort of duration does this valuation have, and what is its relationship with history? Fritzia Irízar investigates the value of materials such as gold, diamonds and pearls, on the basis of their correlation with processes of work, exploitation and consumption.
Mazatlanica aims to be a space—a place, a species, an identity—where the precious material serves as the guiding thread to bring together a series of works in which what is appreciated is addressed in a critical manner. With her work, Irízar makes evident the physical and conceptual resistance of the material by diluting it, wearing it out, undoing it, dissolving it or grafting it and thus giving shape to new corporealities.
Gold is one of the minerals that recur in the work of Irízar due to its stable and durable qualities: in Untitled (On Wear), this material allows her to reify the traces of work by casting different tools; for Untitled (The Disappearance of the Symbol) she unties the golden thread of the Phrygian cap, a historic symbol of freedom; in Untitled (Makech), the gold is incrusted in the carapace of a beetle native of Yucatan. Meanwhile, her work with pearls seeks to criticize the living, for example, with Untitled (On Cleopatra) she recounts a historical tale; Untitled (Mother of Pearl Graft) is rooted in material transmutations, the result of years of work of extraction and of comparing the processes of exploitation with the grafting of mother-of-pearl in oysters and in people for Untitled (Human Graft).
Beyond the precious character of the “material,” the notion of the jewel is deployed in the exhibition in a number of analogies and comparisons. On the one hand, it addresses the duality “animal-jewel,” such as the makech, where the symbiosis occurs between the material and the animal in a partnership of asymmetric power. On the other, the jewel is also created by the animal itself, as shown in projects related to the phenomenon of the pearl. Finally, the jewel is inserted “naturally,” in the animal, while Irízar grafts it onto a human being, as seen in the project Untitled (Human Graft), where the biological cycle of creation of the pearl is inverted when it is introduced into the body of a person in order to restore the expulsion of the pearl from the oyster.
Irízar investigates the fragility, the contingency, the transmutation of the material and its relation with the value that emerges from the tension between historical, animal and social questions.
Artist: Fritzia Irízar (Culiacán, 1977)
Curators: Helena Chávez Mac Gregor and Virginia Roy Luzarraga
Publicación
Publication
Fritzia Irízar
Authors : Helena Chávez Mac Gregor, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Virginia Roy Luzarraga, Fritzia Irízar
Language : Spanish & English
Editor: MUAC, UNAM / RM
Price: $180
