“Ximena Cuevas is Mexico's video artist extraordinaire: half magician, half mermaid, master of all she surveys.”-B. Ruby Rich
PFA is pleased to present the first West Coast tribute to Mexican artist Ximena Cuevas. Absorbed by the minutiae of the everyday, Cuevas calls her spirited work a “laboratory of life,” an experimental process personal in its origins, but public in its scope. She “looks upon her beloved metropolis of Mexico City with an eye both jaundiced and passionate,” as critic B. Ruby Rich has said, yet that eye carefully scrutinizes the world from the inside out, finding the secret whispers of individual yearning as telling as the great urban tumult. Cuevas begins with unadorned observations of mundane Mexican life, then reinvents them through her forceful vision. Gender and desire are often the stuff of her pleasurable encounters, but these themes are never expressed as personal exorcism. Rather, this plucky artist is preoccupied with the implications of received behavior, with notions such as romance and machismo-in other words, with the myths that charge a culture.
In her artist residency, Cuevas will present videoworks spanning the early 1980s to the present, as well as a Free First Thursday screening of recent video art from Mexico City she has selected for the occasion. On Friday afternoon she will conduct a free salon centered on her artistic process, conceived especially for students and aspiring artists. Please join us to experience Ximena Cuevas's laboratory of life.
Steve Seid