Paulina Velázquez Solís
Multifungi
March 31, 7pm
Doors open at 6:30pm
Multifungi is a project of media performance with live animation and sound. The performance is an exercise in control and chaos enacted by the hybridization of disciplines between the visual arts, sound and performance. Multifungi captures the amorphous that escape classification, proposing an aesthetic of the abject, the organic and decomposition, which are represented by cyclic transformation of images and textured sound and noise.
The work focuses specifically on mushrooms, as they are neither plants nor animals, they are their own kingdom. Mushrooms reproduce in resilient ways, have varied textures and ways of surviving. They also can change their environment to create and sustain the cycle of life by decomposing matter. Using narratives that oscillate between foreseen circumstances and improvisation, the artist Paulina Velázquez Solís employs drawing and found materials that interact in a sequence of destruction and transformation.
The performance is aligned with a Noise aesthetic and the “tight chaos” it can create.
Paulina Velázquez Solís (México/Costa Rica, 1981) is a visual artist and art educator, working with diverse media such as installation, sculpture, drawing, animation, and multimedia performance. With a general interest in the strange, her latest work is interested in the oddities hidden within nature and the body. Particularly the ones that scape the discourse on normality. The interest in these subjects is seen through personal experiences such as pregnancy and postpartum, separating these experiences from the archetype created by the male gaze. Other works draw on the biological and how the relationships in nature operate and are influenced by our cultural notions.
Her work has been presented in places like Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, TEOR/éTica and Instituto México in Costa Rica, Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan, ExTeresa Arte Actual in México City, Museo de Arte in San Salvador, Torino Contemporanea in Italy, La Casa de las Américas in Havana, Cuba, Mengi in Reykjavik, Iceland, Museum of the Americas in Washington DC, UCLA Biennial in Los Ángeles, SUNY Gallery in New Paltz, New York, Mission Cultural Center, Root Division, The Lab and the Berkeley Art Museum in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as various film festivals.
She graduated in Art and Visual Communication, Printmaking at Universidad Nacional in Costa Rica, and obtained an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute, in San Francisco, California as a Fulbright Scholar.
She is lecturer at the department of Art at Ithaca College, and visiting critic at the Department of Art at Cornell University, and is currently the Co-Chair of the Communications Committee for New Media Caucus.
She lives and works in Ithaca, New York.
