April 7-8th, 2018
VINZ on FAIRFAX
950 S Fairfax Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90036
Torres Gutierrez has curated a group exhibition that showcases a variety of artistics disciplines of Mexican artists and designers from Los Angeles, New York, Mexico City and Tijuana.
NERO48 Pop-up store, is a commercial platform of contemporary Mexican design. It will open its doors for 48 hours on April 7th & 8th for the first time in the U.S. to showcase talent from different regions of Mexico and California.
The fifth edition of NERO48 Pop-up store will come to VINZ on Fairfax in Los Angeles, a new real estate development by Alliance Residential, which proposes a lifestyle surrounded by exclusive design. NERO48 Pop-up store offers visitors a unique multi-sensorial experience where you will enjoy workshops and lectures presented by an international creative community.
NERO48 Pop-up store aims to be a channel of distribution, brand positioning, and exposure for new producers as well as brands that present an innovative proposal within the Mexican design market. It also seeks to give visibility to the Mexican talent residing abroad and to promote national culture and identity.
Curator: Karla Aguñiga
Participating Artist
M.A
M.A. is a project lead by Melissa Avila, a multidisciplinary artist from Tijuana, Mex. This project arises from a desire to combine her artistic production with traditional artisanal techniques. She is specifically interested in establishing relationships that expand and activate creative fields and work methods based on tradition, local knowledge, and the intersection of personal and collaborative work.
For M.A she create unique pieces that are handmade alongside artisans who specialize in different ancestral processes. Her goal is to bridge the traditional and contemporary practices. Working with native Mexican communities, helping to preserve craftsmanship and create both opportunity and income using fair and horizontal manufacturing practices.
She currently lives in Mexico City where she dedicated herself to cultural management based education, photography and drawing.
Tanya Aguiñiga
Tanya Aguiñiga (b. 1978) is a Los Angeles based artist/designer/craftsperson who was raised in Tijuana, Mexico. She holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from San Diego State University. In her formative years she created various collaborative installations with the Border Arts Workshop, an artists' group that engages the languages of activism and community-based public art. Her current work uses craft as a performative medium to generate dialogues about identity, culture and gender while creating community. This approach has helped Museums and non-profits in the United States and Mexico diversify their audiences by connecting marginalized communities through collaboration.
Aguiñiga is a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of Crafts and Traditional Arts, a NALAC and Creative Capital 2016 Grant Awardee. She has been the subject of a cover article for American Craft Magazine and has been featured in PBS's Craft in America Series. Aguiñiga is the founder and director of AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), an ongoing series of artist interventions and commuter collaborations that address bi-national transition and identity in the US/Mexico border regions. AMBOS seeks to create a greater sense of interconnectedness while simultaneously documenting the border.
Patricia Alpizar
Born and raised in central Mexico. Currently spending time between Mexico City and Los Angeles. Fell in love with the art of painting with light at a very young age. Her work has been featured in magazines like 192, Gatopardo, Premium Club and Vice México. Her commercial work includes clients such as Kurimanzutto Gallery, Lemon Group and HBO Latin Miami. Her latest series are based in the exploration of nature, combining her love for hikes, traditional herbal medicine, and painting with light. Her series feature plants, flowers, grass, weeds, elements found in nature. Her intention with this study of light and nature is to create the space of silence you find up in a mountain or the quiet and peace of the ocean. The medium she chose to work with is Cyanotype and her influence is Anna Atkins who is believed to be the first woman to have ever published a photographic book with her botanical work.
Disciplina Studio
Disciplina is a Mexico City based industrial and architecture studio. The goal of our studio is to foster and execute fresh and relevant ideas. We conceptualize, produce and design decorative objects and furniture. We work collaboratively and develop creative projects based on an art direction approach.
Daniel Gibson
Born in Yuma Az. in 1977. Daniel grew up in El Centro Ca. and other surrounding towns that border Mexicali B.C. Daniel's inspiration starts while growing up next to a sheet rock factory in Plaster City Ca. where his father worked. The vast desert horizon and emptiness lent its path to imagination and wander. Gibson's output is bred by his indispensable draw towards creation, something he views as a therapeutic and expressive flow of visions and beliefs, real life situations and overwhelming dreams, comprised of a combination of elements incomparably extricated with a whiff of vato attitude.
Daniel now lives and works in Los Angeles Ca. Still drawing from memories of being cooked by the desert sun.
Sergio Miguel
Sergio Miguel (Mexicali, 1992) is a Mexican-born artist based in Los Angeles, California. His work takes on New Objectivity portraiture technique while examining Latino and queer identities.
After completing studies in Art History and Criticism in San Diego and Paris, he lived in Santiago, Chile where he began work on his current portrait series.
In 2017, Sergio Miguel moved his studio to L.A., where he now resides
Ana Lopez Escobedo
Ana Lopez Escobedo is a Tijuana-raised artist and visual designer based in Brooklyn, New York. Ana's work captures the juxtaposition of cultures that defined her experience growing up in Tijuana: Her collages merge original photography of Baja and Southern California landscapes with imagery from non-native locations – creating "blended" environments reflective of both Mexico and America.
Ana has previously lived and worked in San Diego, Los Angeles, and Miami and worked with artists such as Jen Stark (who she assisted with Art Basel exhibits in 2012 and 2013). You can follow her on Instagram @ana__escobedo.
Ulysses Lizarraga
Native to Tijuana, Mexico, Ulysses is a Los Angeles based artist and engineer. His work has been featured in publications such as Paradise Magazine, Pocket, and Likha Magazine. His latest series is based on the spontaneous observation of found objects in industrial and commercial settings in the fringes of Los Angeles. He aims to shed light over the hidden beauty of these isolated sites, oftentimes forgotten and remaining perpetually anonymous.
Conrad Ruiz
Conrad Ruiz (Monterey, CA, 1983) is a painter who works primarily with watercolors. Ruiz creates works in series that explore various visual themes of masculinity and athleticism, from the Beijing Olympics to waves crashing against the beaches of California. Often painting works that draw on popular imagery from video games and men's magazines, Ruiz explores different ways of depicting and abstracting the body, frequently through paintings that portray athletes in motion. Drawing on repetitive imagery and abstracted geometric forms in many of his works, Ruiz seeks to convey the notion of non-identity and an absence of individual personality, even as he takes as his subject the human form. In works such as his Climax series, which depicts the climactic scene of fictional movies that Ruiz has imagined, the artist is interested in the boundary between fantasy and reality, and many of his compositions tow the line between the two, evidencing fantastical imagery set amidst everyday scenes.
Juan Villavicencio
Juan Villavicencio (B. 1986) is a native of Ensenada who lives and works in Tijuana. He is a ceramic artist that investigates the boundaries between art, craft and design simultaneously questioning mexican identity. He creates one of a kind objects that reference Mexican curios or kitsch Mexican craft that could be found in souvenir shops around Tijuana such as talavera and velvet sculptures. His recent body of works Oscuranas references velvet sculptures that could be found at shops near the US/Mex border. Las Oscuranas are abstracted liquid-like high fired ceramic forms covered in black velvet that seek to question volume, space and gravity.
Some of his recent exhibition include BC to BC, Some clay artists from Baja California to British Columbia, San Diego Art Institute (2017), 1ra Bienal Nacional de cerámica contemporánea, CECUT. Tijuana, B.C. México (2016), All kind of mexican art crafts, 206 Arte Contemporáneo, Tijuana, B.C. México (2014), La colección Elias+Fontes (Historia/relato) Centro cultural Tijuana, Tijuana, B.C. México (2015). And the upcoming exhibition Being here with you / Estando aquí contigo, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2018).