Monica Guerrero; Time as A Storyteller

Ever laid your wondering eyes upon an old piece of furniture? Did you ask yourself how long had it been there without movement? You might have also started to think about the object's life.  Who had used, who had disposed of it. Ever stopped to look at a newborn infant. Did that make you think about the passing of time. Did you reminisce childhood memories, didn’t the time pass away so quickly? Some say time is like water; adaptable, ever-flowing, calm yet capable of powerful things. Have you ever tried to grasp water with your hands, doesn’t it slip trough your fingers quietly, without a sound, yet unstoppable.

Monica Guerro, a mexican painter and photographer, has set herself to capture time in photography. In order to visualize the totality of her accomplishment, it is better to view the whole serie, one after the other, gazing and pondering on each photograph at the time. You will see that Time has been given a new and fuller sense. Guerrero, in each photograph, analyses the different possibilities and relations man has given to it, but mostly how man has observed it. More than that, a general sense of melancholic awe for the passing of time is sensible in these photographs of the mexican landscape. A landscape riveted by the passing of time, it’s population having suffered poverty, spanish dominion, cultural crisises and now the ravages of the drug traffic war. 

While observing her pictures, many questions came to my mind. How many miles did these shoes run for? How long has the snail been sliming on that path, and how long does it still have to go? How are these two people of different generations spending their time together, are they telling each other memories from the past, talking about present stories or about their own particular futures. Truly, these photographs had me think about myself, how do I place myself in time, and others, how have they led their own lives.

Nevertheless, it is not as much as for the intention of grasping time, in what it means or what it does, that Guerrero presents too us these pictures, but of presenting it as a portrait. Just as a portrait tells one’s story, this series present’s time and his particular story depending on different sceneries. It can be young, old, slow, fast, lonely or collective.

These pictures go much farther than being simple photographs of people, animals or objects, they are stories being told. The story of a grandfather and his nephew, the story of a patiently struggling insect, the tale of an energetic city, the tale of an action, a movement. Each picture having a before a now and an after. These pictures fall into the profoundness of time, scratching in them in order to extract its essence. You might wonder if it is necessary, relevant or even useful to seek to understand Time. I believe, Guerrero teaches us that Time is not to  studied  and examined like scientist would. It is to be admired in its greatness and enjoyed as it passes by.

                                            

“We Want Miles” or more than that; We Want Good Memories.

Nevermind the music from today, surge into the music from your past, what you used to listen to when you were younger, wether that means that it was twenty, thirty or even forty years ago, doesn’t it bring something back, doesn’t it make you feel alive again?

Montreal’s Fine Arts Museum retrospective on Miles Davis, starting on April 30th up to August 29th, is quite something to go through, it is an experience of mixed medias. There is music and visual arts combined such as pictures of Miles Davis by Irving Penn or Anton Corbjin and paintings by famous Jean-Michel Basquiat. Though, a third ingredient is added to the pot by the spectators themselves. They include an element of remembrance. Good memories are added as to create something moving, filled with joy and energy. The whole exhibition space becomes a time machine.

At the beginning, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this retrospective. How is mixing music with visual arts going to be comprehensible and linkable for the viewers. As I walked from room to room, I realized that for most of them, truly understanding both influences on one another wasn’t the point. The whole point of going to see “We Want Miles” is because the did indeed want some Miles back in their lives. 

At one point, getting tired of walking around without a moment’s rest, I decided to sit for a bit. Next to me was a grown up couple. The husband was dark skinned and the wife white. I couldn’t help to overhear what they were saying. While listening to “Boplicity” from the album “The birth of the Cool”, the couple was talking about how they met in a café to this song. They were quietly singing the song together and smiling to each other, both filled with emotions and pleasing memories from their past. This scene truly moved me as I realized that these people were here to enjoy a bit of music, see a few pictures, learn a bit more about the man, and have a good time. Some people were singing. Others were dancing to the music. Some others were even mimicking as though they were playing the trumpet. It was a wonderful thing to see all these people, old and young alike, appreciate the music they used to listen to when they were young or that their grand father used to make them listen. Moreover, for anyone who didn’t know Miles Davis beforehand, he would get a sense of the greatness of the man for his power of inspiration in people and his ability to put generations together with his melody. At the oppening night, Marcus Miller, Davis’s ex-bass player himself was present. Walking for several hours in the museum’s retrospective, he demonstrated that the remembrance of the epoch was the important aspect of the exposition. Immersing oneself in what used to be the glorious days of jazz, blues and Miles Davis 

Furthermore, the general construction of the retrospective was well done. Categorizing all the different musical genres invented by Miles Davis was one of their well achieved tasks. It explains the going from blues to bepop to jazz cool up to his more rocky-electrical musical creations. This gave the amateur viewers a comprehension of the musical genius of the man, and to the more connoisseur viewers something to remember. A particular work in the retrospective that really impressed me was his musical creation for the French movie director Louis Malle. Indeed, for his movie of 1958 called “l’Ascensceur pour l’Échafaud” (Elevator to the Gallows), Malle asked Davis to create the music for his movie. The musician was placed in front of a screen with the movie rolling. He improvised the music in one shot, all based on his impression of the images. It may sound very easy to do, just play whatever and it will sound good. Not quite. It requires to be very sensitive and really understand the meaning of an image in order to extract it and transform it in sound. It is almost indescribably challenging. That whole improvisation by Davis made me think of Andy Warhol who somehow would do the same thing. In his “factory” he would put songs on replay like “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones and therefore get a general ambiance for the creation of his visual works. So, just as Warhol created images out of sound, Davis created music out of images. They both felt and expressed what they perceived from these mediums. As Miles Davis put it himself: “Music is a painting that we can hear, Painting is a music that we can see”.

If you plan on going to the retrospective, and I hope you will, I nevertheless recommend to go with a lot of time ahead of yourself. Take the time to really appreciate what the curators have built, but also how people around you react to the expo, hopefully, you will as well find an old couple remembering themselves of the times of the great Miles Davis with a big “we want some more Miles” expression on their faces.

Below is the video of Davis improvising the music for Malle’s movie “Ascensceur pour l’Échafaud” based on the images showed to him. Keep in mind it’s all improvised, no partition.

Emilia Sirrs: The Power of Art

What is it about an artist that will make us relate to their work? Is it a feeling of understanding? Maybe a feeling of déjà-vu?   Maybe we are even able to imagine the artist fighting with their feelings in order to create a work of art. Shockingly, more often than not, these abstract- or feeling centered- works will seem childish or even easy to duplicate for non-professional art observers. They are not. Art works hide many things within them, stories and inspirations, cries and laughters, sadness and happiness.

What role does art really fulfill? Are they there only to represent an idea? To communicate a message, wether political or social? Art can also be a way to express themselves, mend injuries and find a way to repair damages in one’s personal life. They can also transmit one’s  extreme happiness. They say Winston Churchill himself painted in order to relax. Usually, when I write an article about an artist, I try to gather as much information about them as possible, knowing that someone’s life, what happened to them, who they met, really influences their work. Merlau-Ponty, the French philosopher said that there wasn’t seeing without vision. This means that according to one’s life, what you see, and consequently what you think and do are a directly influenced by those events. 

Emilia Sirrs is a Mexican painter born in Cincinnati Ohio. She arrived to Mexico at six years old. A few years later, she started taking drawing and painting classes and eventually became a student of renowned painters Pascual Santillán , Francisco Salas y José Lazcarro. Overall, she has had more than 40 collective, and individual expositions nationwide and even internationally such as in Belgium and the United States.

Taking into account that I don’t know much more about Emilia Sirrs that can tell me these few facts, I do know though that her life influenced how she saw the world and how her painting was to develop through time.  Upon seeing Sirrs work for the first time, I was rejoiced by seeing these elements from daily life incorporate her work. I saw it as an explosion of creativity, leaving the classic and going for new mediums. Expanding from the canvas like a wave engulfing her surroundings.  Yet, I decided that criticizing a work of art as lightly as that, based solely on my first impression with no more thorough exploration was somewhat amateur. I then discovered how powerful a weapon art can be for some artists. How it is not to be taken lightly.  Art becomes one with the artists just as language is to a writer, without it they have no more tools to express themselves and to communicate their feelings and thoughts. Moreover, this part of them that art becomes will therefore evolve with the artist himself even if he doesn’t know. It will reflect their moods and states. The work of art might become independent from the artist, but the artist won’t become independent from it. As Edvar Munch, the famous Norwegian painter said: “Colours gain a life of their own once they have been applied on the canvas”. Though, the artist’s life does not end once the canvas has been laid by pigments, it goes on.

Emilia Sirrs proved to me this power of art. Having suffered a loss in her life, her painting, just as her, have changed.  One evolved with the other. Before the event, her art was vibrant, independent, as Munch would say.  One of her works, “La Pasion” has evidently a real strength to it. You could look at it for hours on end, just as you would a Rothko.  A passion was transmitted from the painter’s hand on to the canvas. Sincerely, it’s one of those works where the words are not enough to describe it. An image is mandatory to the comprehension.  Below is the image of this painting. 

After that point, her art changed.  The loss of someone transformed her, and thus her art. Having that possibility of using art as a tool of self-mending, she did so in a way where creativity, but more than that, a deep feeling, a need presented itself. Just as Joseph Beuy’s fat came as a healing object, these materials with inscribed memories on them came as part of her art in order to work on it, remember it and then pass it on, inscribing it forever on the canvas. She put those memories in a shoebox called art, never to be opened again. 

That is why Emilia Sirrs appealed to me as an artist. She exemplified beautifully this power art can have. Art is much more than a drawing. It is more than three lines of different colours put aside to one another. It is more than a painted sofa against the wall. It is a purifying exercise, and a very exhausting one too. It is a way to put down what is on our minds and our hearts, passing that energy, wether good or bad that lives in us, onto a final object, wether to be disposed off as a bad memory or to be kept as a remembrance of something good that happened to us, just as a picture on the wall.   

This combined work, named “Ausencia” (Absence), is the triggering one that will follow on a full series of works. Emilia Sirrs, as she told me, plans to recycle all these pieces of furniture and transform them into works of art in order to close an episode in her life. I honestly cannot wait to see the rest of the serie. If it is as intense and emotional as “Ausencia”, we can truly expect to see something extraordinary. It will disting  uish from mere Sunday painters from the ones that have made art a part of themselves. 

By clicking on the title, you will directly access to the artist's webpage.