Mario Garcia Torres
R.R. and the Expansion of the Tropics
December 2, 2014–April 19, 2015
Pérez Art Museum Miami
1103 Biscayne Boulevard
Miami, FL 33132
Pérez Art Museum Miami is pleased to present a newly commissioned project by Mexico-City based artist Mario Garcia Torres (b.1975, Monclova, Mexico).
R.R. and the Expansion of the Tropics is a museographical scenario in which a number of seemingly unrelated subjects such as Robert Rauschenberg, climate change and social issues in South Florida are threaded to create a narrative that span the last three decades in the region. This intertwined chronicle is structured around several artistic gestures that use photographic documentation, film, sound and sculpture as their final output.
Garcia Torres has long been interested in exploring little-known issues within recent art history and in addressing parallel subjects that find new meanings and contexts through his careful juxtapositions. For this project the notion of the tropics and their use is explored. The artist started by looking at another commission, produced in Miami 35 years ago. On that occasion, Florida resident Robert Rauschenberg was asked to engage the cover of Tropic—the Miami Herald Sunday magazine—to produce a work of art that would to be massively distributed to all of the newpaper’s subscribers. The collaged image of the city of Miami and its surroundings was delivered on the last Sunday of the decade of the ’70s. In this project, Rauschenberg’s Piece for Tropic is reframed in order to introduce a shift in the notion of tropics, one helped by the recent discovery that the global region of the tropics has been expanding towards both the North and South poles. According to Garcia Torres, “Scientific knowledge historically defined the tropics from a geographical perspective; but later they were transformed into a cultural concept predicated on an image of ease and leisure. Now the fact that the region is expanding, new cultural understandings can be developed, ones that imply a complex political and social discussion, in addition to reorganizing perspectives on the lives of those that currently live or will live in tropical parts of the world.”
Mario Garcia Torres has previously presented solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Hirschhorn Museum, Washington; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; UC Berkeley Museum of Art and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museo Madre, Naples and the Kunsthalle Zurich; among others. His work has also been exhibited in Paris at the Centre George Pompidou and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Tate Modern in London and the Kroller-Muller in Otterlo, as well as in the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico, and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Garcia Torres has participated in numerous group exhibitions such as the 29th São Paulo Biennial; the 2010 Taipei Biennial; the IX Baltic Triennial, Vilnius; the 8th Panama Biennal; the 2008 Yokohama Triennial; the 52nd Venice Biennale; Documenta 13, Kassel; and the 8th Berlin Biennial.
R.R. and the Expansion of the Tropics is organized by Pérez Art Museum Miami Chief Curator Tobias Ostrander.
