EXHIBITIONS
Mario Garcia Torres “Telltale of A Sunday Practice”
Dates: Dec 15, 2012 – Jan 12, 2013
(Winter holidays: Dec 28, 2012 – Jan 7, 2013)
Location: Taka Ishii Gallery (Kiyosumi, Tokyo)
Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to announce “Telltale of A Sunday Practice”, the third solo exhibition in Japan of Mexico City based artist Mario Garcia Torres. For his second exhibition at Taka Ishii Gallery, Garcia Torres will premier a new body of works which rethink his own studio problematics as seen through the lens of conceptual art practices.
The exhibition’s main piece, The Kid Who Loved Being Bored, is a short-essay about the beauty and usage of boredom, which takes the form of a children’s book. In the tale, the discovery of Xoco with such an emotional state and his momentary existence in a beam of light are recounted and used to glimpse at the possibility of emancipation through imagination.
Presented in the exhibition as a slide show projection, the work pretends to review the codes of an art presentation to accommodate youngsters in a gallery setting. TKWLBB was written by Garcia Torres, illustrated by Tomoko Hirasawa and accompanied with music by Gustavo Mauricio Hernández Dávila (Quiero Club).
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.
Born in Monclova, 1975, Mexico, Garcia Torres received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (2005). His solo exhibitions have included the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010), the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2009), the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2009), and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2007). He has also participated in the Bienal de São Paulo (2010), the Taipei Biennial (2010), and the Yokahama Triennial (2008), the Biennale di Venezia (2007) and Documenta 13 (2012). He is the winner of the 2007 Frieze Cartier Award.