Body Pixel

L(..)king at Others exhibition also gave me the opportunity to check artwork by Pedro Lasch. Those who are fairly interested in contemporary art that deals with unethically exploiting of people in the world’s poorest countries, could find his work to be very moving.

Lasch’s ‘Media Defacements’ is rather known artwork by an activist who’s enough challenging to jump into a range scale of media to re-evaluate social burdens and injustices in his native Latin America making parallels to other countries with huge political crisis.

Photo: Pedro Lasch (c)

Pedro Lasch (1975, Mexico City) is New York based artist and theoretician at the Duke University, having in focus the Practice of Visual Arts. His carriers – professor and artist – could not be divided because he uses the same method in both practices. The method of direct confrontation and semantic identification.

Photo: Pedro Lasch (c)

His project Naturalization is an ongoing project that has been developed and fragmented through several video and sort of performative projects: The Dance of Mirrors, Point-Counterpoint-Fusion – Homage to Daniel Buren, Statements on the Mask – Part 1, Planes in Space or What Are We Before We Are Naturalized?, The Execution of Maximilian, The Mechanism of Facial Expression…

Photo: Pedro Lasch (c)

Tools he uses in his work are squarely designed mirror masks with geometrically precise cut-outs in the eye and mouth areas with slim elastic suspenders. As for the masks bearers, they are completely neutral, but for the reflected images – not.

Photo: Pedro Lasch (c)

Masks are designed for switching social identities and situations triggering serious questions on political situation and social harm.

‘Media Defacements’ is slightly different from the rest of the projects within the same framework, because Lasch is using photojournalist images emended by him, in order to connect seemingly not connective parts of the world in one semiotic unit.

Photo: Pedro Lasch (c)

Thereby, Lasch says about the project: ‘The initial perception created by these masks is one of spatial and psychological confusion. Subjects are reversed if only one person is wearing the mask. If several people wear them and look at each other, their faces disappear and transform into an endless set of reflections of other mirrors, other faces, environments, and objects. Landscape and subject are one and many.’

Photo: Pedro Lasch (c)

‘Subjects are inseparable from each other, their bodies dismembered by rectangular planes departing and arriving through reflected gazes. Light breaks and travels on these masks with unpredictable speed and variety. Space and movement become counter-intuitive.’

His latest engaging project was painting entitled ‘Mural version - Ephemeral or permanent’ as part of the Latino/A America series, thematizing the issue of migration and language contextualization of Latin cultures on the ‘New Continent’. The project was presented in rather interesting book An Atlas of Radical Cartography.