The Dark Side of Design
Regina Pozo
Curator
10.23.2012 - 10.27.2012
@ Centro Cultural del México Contemporáneo in the framework of the festival: Abierto Mexicano de Diseño.
All images Courtesy of Archivo Diseño y Arquitectura.
EYE COLLECTION: THE DARK SIDE OF DESIGN
Curatorial Text:
We will open, then, a peep hole into a private collection. We will expose manias under risk of contagion. Through this sample, we will attempt to expose some of the dynamics and vital moments that define the exercise of collectors. Others can be called hoarders, sick with anxiety, perhaps no more than compulsive individuals. Others can merely buy or acquire without a true sense to succeed as a collector. From this dark side we will be able to share mysteries that are kept in private, behind curtains, under trunks and chests that, when gone unnoticed by the right eye, never come to exist as a Collection, in capital letters. They would remain as furniture forever. We bring you this approach to the Eye Collection, owned by Alexandre and Aurelia Lemaire, a couple we are truly thankful for their generosity and trust when confiding these treasures to us for putting them on display.
Let us then, step into a window to daily life understood through Art, Design and, why not, Decorative Arts. All of them a solid body. This can only be possible within a personal collection and it is the reason why curators allowed me to expose some issues that can be revised from an aesthetic point of view and not from the discursive mechanics of Design; an interpretative freedom mediating between Art and Design. These kind of essays reap the idea of Design being –the same as some artistic remains– a good sign pointing to cultural keys that fuel research that will help us understand or reveal some cultural phenomena. This time, I approached aesthetic issues for the hypothesis of our sample, which is focused on images, mostly Internet’s. All this has been contemplated under contemporary scrutiny; volatile and mediated by popular culture, plus the superhybrid (what is chewed on and out by the Web). It is a way of seeing, understanding and processing information.
This special exercise within the rooms of Centro Cultural del México Contemporáneo reaches out to the past trying to establish a notion based on background, shallowly working through form and visual allusions. As shallow as popular culture conceives imagery consumerism. The main idea is projecting a second level of reading, drawing a path for the creation of a visual reality mainly developed inside an artistic and graphic environment and tracking its travel to the visuals of the Web nowadays. These already live with us, abstracted from the virtual world. Where do these references come from? Perhaps this exhibition will give us some clue.
Regina Pozo