artist 37 and 38 (buenos dias from south america)

Doris Salcedo

Salcedo, whose main medium is sculpture, was born in 1958 in Colombia.  She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Universidad de Bogotá, Jorge Tadeo Lozano in 1980, before traveling to New York, where she completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at New York University. She then returned to Bogotá to teach at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Her work is influenced by her experiences of life in Colombia, and is generally composed of items of furniture.  Salcedo often employs objects from the past, objects imbued with an important sense of history and, through these contemporary memory sculptures, illustrates the flow of time. 

“The way that an artwork brings materials together is incredibly powerful. Sculpture is its materiality. I work with materials that are already charged with significance, with meaning they have required in the practice of everyday life…then, I work to the point where it becomes something else, where metamorphosis is reached.” -Salcedo

Salcedo takes ordinary objects and uses their embodied histories, evolved forms and sheer quantities to impress upon people the weight of time and meaning inherent in everyday items. She has a fondness for domestic and commonplace materials – from textiles to wood furniture – that show wear and tear over time.  To further charge her work she frequently puts it right in public view, displacing a space people normally think of as empty to send her (open-to-interpretation) political, economic and historical messages.  An example of one of her larger scale furniture sculptures is her Installation at 8th International Istanbul Biennial, done in 2003. Here, she has stacked 1600 wooden chairs on the corner of the street between two buildings. 

Eugenio Dittborn

Dittborn was born in 1943 in Chile, and now lives and works in Santiago de Chile.  However, his paintings don't necessarily live and work there with him.  Since 1984, Eugenio Dittborn has been making works that he calls "Airmail Paintings." They are constructed collages made of cheap, lightweight materials: photocopied images and text, culled from a wide variety of sources, sewn onto clothes-lining fabric, sometimes with the addition of printed or painted marks and messages. The large panels are then folded and packed into specially made envelopes and sent off on their travels.

These itinerant artworks collect meanings like souvenirs, as they journey from place to place, across borders, over time. Made, in part, in response to Santiago's place at the periphery of the international art scene and partly to circumvent the oppressive and regimented structures of Chile's military government, (as well as to reflect previous periods of colonization and repression) these mobile visual messages are free to go anywhere and initiate an evolving dialogue with their global audience.

Isn't that fascinating?  Dittborn uses his country's history and his own understanding of the cultural and political struggles that have been and continue to be an issue as a platform to create.  This would be old hat if it weren't for the physical act of sending these issues abroad, setting them free, allowing the paintings to experience a life outside of Chile while he remains in his hometown.  It reminds me of a message in a bottle, or a musician creating music in order to set free the thoughts and conflicts inside his own heart.  

"...Travel is the politics of my paintings; and the folds, the unfolding of that politics."  -Dittborn.

http://www.iniva.org/dare/themes/space/dittborn.html