- Carlos Arias took to his exhibition in Santiago, Chile, works of his series Pahuatlán and Jornadas, the latter begun in 1995 and on which he´s worked for almost 25 years.
Carlos Arias, artist and faculty member at Universidad de las Américas Puebla, opened an exhibition in Santiago, Chile, after an absence of almost two decades. This time his collected works – La trama (auto)biográfica The (Auto)biographical Weft, held at the Museum of Visual Arts (MAVI) – represents the most important individual show of the artist in Chile. In it, he stresses social topics such as minorities, gender, sexuality, race, and immigration from an autobiographical point pf view.
The (Auto)biographical Weft: A file in transit was curated by Dr. Cynthia Francica. It shows his work as a function of objects in need of a register – a queer file, or an alternate record of stories of minority groups that are not present in official files. Its purpose is also to visualize the work of Arias in the Chilean context from the perspective of a life in a minority.
For this exhibit the artist selected works he has made since 1994, when he started to embroider and abandoned painting until today, yielding a total of 16 embroidered works in different formats. “My work is totally atemporal. I have works from ´97 until 2007 and they don’t feel old. Thread, due to its homey quality, is pleasant” explained Carlos Arias.
During the colloquium Art, Minorities, and Immigration, organized for this exhibit, Carlos Arias commented: “This exhibition arose from the book The Thread of Life (El hilo de la vida) published by UDLAP and very well edited. I sent it to some friends in Santiago, specifically to Sergio Parra, who told me that he wanted to invite me to exhibit at his gallery.” However, because Arias´s last exhibition had been held in 2002, Sergio Parra put him in touch with Maria Elena Alcalde and Cynthia Francica, who decided to exhibit it at the MAVI.
The Chilean artist, who arrived in Mexico in 1988, presents through his work the exploration of hybrid spaces in aesthetic and racial terms that extend to sexuality, gender and (trans)nationality, depicting these dimensions through identity research and intermediate spaces. This show will be available to the Chilean public until October 27, offering all its visitors a history of modern and vanguard art represented in pieces with indigenous motifs and aesthetics, like the series Pahuatlán, as well as his work Jornadas begun in 1995 and which is 20 meters long.