Dates: Nov 21 – Dec 12, 2009
Opening reception: Saturday, Nov 21, 18:00 – 20:00

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Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to announce the second solo exhibition in Japan of Los Angeles based artist Mario Garcia Torres. For his first exhibition at Taka Ishii Gallery, the artist will premier Unspoken Dailies, a feature length film.

Unspoken Dailies is based on a conference essay written by the artist several years before it was adapted into a script and eventually turned into a film. Unspoken Dailies is a film study about, time and silence, the unsaid and the forgotten.

Shot in real time, the 66 min. film features actor Diego Luna [Milk (2008), Mister Lonely (2006), Y tu mama también (2001)] reading the mentioned script for himself for the first time as the camera rolled. Nothing is said, but much is revealed in Unspoken Dailies, which as it is projected, becomes a long screen test of the actor, an audio portrait of Mexico City where the film was shot, and an essay about real and cinematic time.

In his work Garcia Torres explores the potential of a diverse range of media including but not limited to photography, film, performance and printed intervention in order for it to serve as a tool in his own re-examination of concerns related to history and conceptual art practice. Exploiting the seemingly objective informational aesthetic of conceptual presentation, Garcia Torres unearths and employs gaps in memory and understanding to address concerns of an immediate relevance.

As in other works by the artist, Unspoken Dailies takes as its starting point a specific recent art history chapter: the conference turned into its script defends the potential of the hint in conceptual art and more specifically in the work of Bas Jan Ader. Beyond converting it into a narrative the idea is reconstituted through the film making process.

Unspoken Dailies will be shown along other material related to the making and construction of the film, which was shot by Alexis Zabé [Temporada de patos (2004), Silent Light (2007)] and features an original score by Alejandro Rosso [ Plastilina Mosh, Panorama On]

Some of Garcia Torres’s representative works include I Promise Every Time shown at Agnes Hotel Art Fair, Tokyo (2007). This was the first work shown by the artist in Japan. It is a story of an artist that makes a promise every time he is in a hotel room. The story is told through a song and the papers on which he wrote the song lyrics.

In Il aurait bien pu le promettre aussi (He might as well have promised it too), 2009 recently exhibited at Jeu de Paume, is a slideshow of Garcia Torres’s photos taken during his stay in Tokyo and in a local subtitling lab, the artist wishes to reveal a narrative embedded within images; for example, the implications of translating someone else’s work.

Born in 1975 in Monclova, Mexico, Garcia Torres graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in 2005. A selection of recent solo exhibitions includes venues such as CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2009), University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley (2009), Jeu de Paume, Paris (2009), Kunsthalle Zurich (2008), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2007), Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (where he was an artist in residence, 2007).

Garcia Torres also participated in the Yokohama Triennale 2008, 52 Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2007), “Escultura Social”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007), “Learn to Read” and “Saturday Live Actions & Interruptions”, Tate Modern, London (2007) and “Elephant Cemetery”, Artist’s Space, New York (2007). He was the recipient of the Cartier Award at the Frieze Art Fair (2007).

Unspoken Dailies will be screened three times a day (13:00, 15:00, 18:00) during the duration of the exhibition. On the opening day, the film will be screened at 18:10.

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