Ximena Cuevas and the Laboratory of Life

November 3, 2004 - November 5, 2004

Salon with Ximena Cuevas
November 5

"Ximena Cuevas is Mexico's video artist extraordinaire: half magician, half mermaid, master of all she surveys."—B. Ruby Rich

PFA is pleased to present the first West Coast tribute to Mexican artist Ximena Cuevas. Absorbed by the minutiae of the everyday, Cuevas calls her spirited work a "laboratory of life," an experimental process personal in its origins, but public in its scope. She "looks upon her beloved metropolis of Mexico City with an eye both jaundiced and passionate," as critic B. Ruby Rich has said, yet that eye carefully scrutinizes the world from the inside out, finding the secret whispers of individual yearning as telling as the great urban tumult. Cuevas begins with unadorned observations of mundane Mexican life, then reinvents them through her forceful vision. Gender and desire are often the stuff of her pleasurable encounters, but these themes are never expressed as personal exorcism. Rather, this plucky artist is preoccupied with the implications of received behavior, with notions such as romance and machismo—in other words, with the myths that charge a culture.

In her artist residency, Cuevas will present videoworks spanning the early 1980s to the present, as well as a Free First Thursday screening of recent video art from Mexico City she has selected for the occasion. On Friday afternoon she will conduct a free salon centered on her artistic process, conceived especially for students and aspiring artists. Please join us to experience Ximena Cuevas's laboratory of life.

Steve Seid

Wednesday, November 3, 2004
7:30 a.m. Half-Lies and Other Works
Ximena Cuevas in Person. With humor and daring, video artist Cuevas navigates the chaotic whirl of Mexican culture, meditating on celebrity, representation, and media icons from the late Lupe Velez to contemporary trash talk show La Tombola.

Thursday, November 4, 2004
5:30 a.m. Beyond the Poseidon Adventure: Recent Work from Mexico City (Free Screening!)
Introduced by Ximena Cuevas. Cuevas selects videos that tweak media and meaning.

Thursday, November 4, 2004
7:30 a.m. Sleepworld and Other Works
(Regular Admission.) Ximena Cuevas in Person. Cuevas's recent works form an irreverent encyclopedia of the everyday.

Friday, November 5, 2004
1:30 p.m. Salon with Ximena Cuevas (Free Admission)
Cuevas shares insights about her artistic process in the context of contemporary Mexican culture.

Ximena Cuevas's artist residency is funded by a grant from The Consortium for the Arts at UC Berkeley.