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September 23, 2011 – Review
Diango Hernández’s "If I send you this"
Alan Gilbert
Globalization tends to be portrayed as a mode of abundance (more goods, more communications, more transit, more transactions), and yet its economic underpinnings create conditions of deprivation and want. Diango Hernández’s work navigates between poles of efficiency and scarcity, beginning with his earliest public artistic forays as a member of Ordos Amoris Cabinet, a Cuban collective featuring artists and designers who creatively repurposed everyday objects for pragmatic and ideological uses. This work and his subsequent solo endeavors inevitably return to his experience of living in Cuba, and in particular to the historical hiccup that country has endured both in terms of its own utopian aspirations and the unforgiving economic embargo that the United States and its allies imposed in turn.
As a result, Hernández’s work is riddled with thwarted messages. “If I send you this” is his fourth show at Alexander and Bonin; previous exhibitions have included silenced record players, wooden radio backs installed as a dropped ceiling, and mismatched text on louver windows. His current outing presents a long strand of analog recording tape that snakes along the floor beneath a covered skylight and single fluorescent tube. The small oil-on-paper male figure affixed nearby is trapped with these mute transmissions …