Azucena Vieites. Cross Dissolve – Break You Nice

The exhibition Cross Dissolve–Break You Nice is presented as a follow up to a work long ago begun by Azucena Vieites (Hernani, Guipúzcoa, 1967) through various previous proposals at Valparaiso (Chile), Centro Cultural Montehermoso (Vitoria) or Villa Iris (Santander). The work of Azucena Vieites articulates itself around the use of drawing as "technique and ideology", as a result of a conscious and significant choice for the resolution of a plastic project based on the review and iconographic appropriation of images which come from society and contemporary culture. Through an exhibition project that materializes in an installation in which the artist is facing large formats for the first time, led by the architecture of MUSAC, the issue of representation is addressed, both from the recreational and the fantasy, as well as from the experience and expectations present in the processes of daily life.

With a marked feminist character in reusing and producing her images, Vieites investigates on the order of the genders with respect to children and the relationship of consumption of images from popular culture. It is so as her work combines fashion photographs, logos, musical imagery or childlike graphic games. Vieites incorporates the idea of translation in an effort to contextualize the understanding of a particular moment of contemporary culture. In this sense, it is not surprising that in her images appear previous materials related to popular culture: fashion magazines' photographs, logos and graphics relating to the world of music, or small childlike graphic games.

For Vieites the DIY (Do It Yourself) ethics, born with the punk movement in the 1970s, is still today fully in force in relation to the generation of a new order in which the possibilities of self-management acquire special relevance, especially from a feminist point of view. It is from the concept of self-management that the relationship with the techniques of the fanzine in the work of Vieites are understood. The term "fanzine" refers to self-managed and independent publications, edited with modest and accessible means. Many of these publications are made just for recreation and fun, as a form of political resistance and activism, and can be used as an informal educational tool and as an alternative to cultural devaluation. Likewise, fanzines traditionally (and especially in the "pre-Internet" era) allow those with minority interests to connect with other people with similar interests, as well as produce and document the representation itself.

Vieites' work also reflects on the concept of editing, the idea of "original work", and makes use of repetition and fragmentation as recurrent method. In the words of the artist, "techniques such as screen printing allow me to obtain an image once and again, over and over, and this technique brings out issues that have to do with the idea of original, copy, unique, serial or reproducible work. In the effect of repetition, what it is represented vanishes, is distorted. The image is constructed from that repetitive effect. Something takes place in the interstices that exceeds representation itself, something that rarefies it. From my point of view, one of the reasons for the artistic practice to exist has to do with the capacity to cause estrangement."

For the artist, the fact that an image can be repeated, copied, involves the issues of its "natural" character, as well as a reflection on the opposite original/copy, denying the primacy of the original and the derivative of the copy, and incorporating an idea of the absurdity with respect to the absolute image and linear forms of narration. Also, in terms of identity, it leads to not thinking of it as unique and without discontinuities.

Azucena Vieites
Cross Dissolve – Break You Nice
Kurator: Agustin Perez Rubio