PULSE Artist Profile: Emilio Chapela Perez

19 November 2008

This artist profile is part of a month long series we will be doing on galleries and artists participating in the PULSE Miami Contemporary Art Fair .

We look forward to seeing you there!

SoHo Studios
2136 NW 1st Ave (Entrance @ NW 21st St. )
Miami, FL 33127
Wynwood District

Wednesday, December 3 - Sunday December 7, 2008

Emilio Chapela Perez, "According to Google...", 2008

Emilio Chapela Perez is a conceptual artist with an academic background in mathematics, and his work usually relates with scientific notions, use of the systems, methodological thinking and with a constant research towards abstraction.

Emilio Chapela Perez, According to Google..." (view 2), 2008

“According to Google….”
Google has changed the world. It has become a very effective tool as source of information, but at the same time it is responsible for generating a lot of ambiguity and confusion. But what is the real impact of technological tools like GOOGLE on our society? It might be too soon to know. “According to Google” is an artistic research that supports itself on those tools: It explores their boundaries and points out their inner contradictions. It is based on a self-imposed and convenient trap: one, which supposes that Google represents a sort of collective unconsciousness, where we express ourselves without being aware of it. Contributing in that way, to the growth of an always-changing cluster of information that judges, creates, destroys, questions, answers, constructs and deconstructs. According to Google is just a small sample of that complex collective unconsciousness and how it is configured. The show tries to establish a dialogue between different media, by transporting information form the Internet, where content is very dynamic, to a media like the book, where information becomes static and permanent; Or to a video, where information becomes movement.
According to Google is an encyclopedia that holds, within its 40 issues, thousands of images extracted from the Internet using Google image search engine. Every book on the encyclopedia corresponds to concept or idea that reflects a glimpse of how this digital collective unconsciousness expresses itself. Within the 40 volume encyclopedia there are issues dedicated to ideas like “beautiful”, “ugly” “capitalism”, “communism”, “money”, “art”, “abstraction” and many others.

Emilio Chapela Perez, Spectacular (but empty), 2008
Neon light installation. Edition of 5 + AP.

These days, it has become frequent to discover a lot of attempts in art (some of them desperate and others really intelligent) to amaze us, like if we were staring watching a fireworks spectacle. Art is becoming big, shiny, glossy, noisy and very expensive to produce. But most of all, it is becoming spectacular. “Spectacular… but empty,” is a piece that both, takes part in the game of the spectacle, and criticizes it. It makes a circular comment in such a way that it contradicts itself. It says loud and clear: This is spectacular! And at the same time it says it (silently), but it is empty too. For Raul Zamudio-Taylor, “ It is an ironic allusion to Guy Debord’s important situationist book titled the ‘Society of the Spectacle’ published in 1967.”

Emilio Chapela Perez, Language, 2007
Vinyl on wall and two channel video installation. Edition of 5 + AP.

"Language" is a piece generated using Google on-line translator to deconstruct the definition of language according to Wikipedia. The work explores the ambiguity generated by the use of a computer as an aid to communication on two different layers. The first one is based on the trust put on the definition itself, extracted from a site like Wikipedia where knowledge is constructed horizontally by a collective unconsciousness, which in many cases generates a lot of confusion.
The second layer, where the deconstruction actually happens, consists on the translation using a computer, of the definition of language from English to eight different languages consecutively and back to English. The result is a nonsense definition where the meaning was completely lost in the process.
The curator Koan Jeff Baysa wrote about the piece: “The most illustrative example of transliteration is the common online exercise of computerized translating through successive languages. Mexico City artist Emilio Chapela Pérez piece, language, is an example of a standard English definition of the word ‘language’ processed through successive non-English translations, then back into English, but ends in a mutated nonsensical sequence of words.”

Emilio Chapela Pérez is a Mexican artist that lives and works in Mexico City. In 2007 he made an artistic residency at the ISCP in New York in 2007 with funds provided by the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA), he was awarded with the "Jovenes Creadores" grant in 2004 (FONCA, México) and more recently he won the price "Best emerging artist FEMACO 2008" sponsored by Tequila Gran Centenario, Mexico. He was selected for the XIV Bienal Rufino Tamayo and more recently to show at the Museo Castellón de la Plana in Castellón, Spain as part of a juried exhibition. He has participated in several collective and solo shows both in galleries and museums: Like |EDS| Galeria, the MARTE Museum in San Salvador, the Museo Manuel Felguerez in Zacatecas, among others.

He will be represented by EDS Galeria in Miami.