2025
Ways of Seeing
by Mylene Zozaya-Tinoco
Throughout history, the ways of representing the world have evolved alongside technology. The invention of linear perspective and photography brought us closer to replicating human visual perception, enabling image-making aligned with how we naturally see.
Today, image production is shaped by parameters imposed by dominant technological systems. Photos created through software and processed by invisible algorithms are positioned as objective representations, but they do not correspond to human vision—in perspective or optics. These images gradually become memory records that influence how we see the world, often without us realizing it. >> Continue reading
2023-2024
Memento Mori
by Mylene Zozaya-Tinoco
How are traditional genres from art history being transformed through contemporary artistic production, and how will they, in turn, enter art history under the lens of the 21st century? This piece is my interpretation of the Still Life genre, specifically the Vanitas, in which “reminders of death” were used to highlight the transience of life.
In the past, symbols like skulls, mirrors, and instruments of knowledge were often used in this genre to convey a sense of impermanence, as well as the vanity of human existence. The Latin phrase Memento mori—meaning “Remember that you will die”—was frequently included in such works. >> Continue reading
2022
In search of the self, image & spirit
by PhD Omar Rosales
The contemplation of nature is to manifest the desire to dissolve, to dissolve in the environment, to return to the origin where all the elements that make up the world coexist in the same ontological degree: the human being, the rivers, the animals, the plants, the air and the rain without distinctions or hierarchies. Contemplation calls for a self-emptying, a distancing from the self in order to be us, the world.
Throughout history, the human being has sought to withdraw and take refuge in nature alone in order to enlighten or find itself. This return to the root of the foundation of who we are as human beings is more and more constant given the conditions of life in contemporary societies. Human beings increasingly seek this lightness, this emptying of superfluous needs, to connect again with God, with nature, to seek the religious ecstasy of knowing oneself to be part of something universal beyond one’s immediate social environment, real or virtual. In this society where time is a primordial factor in everyday life, sitting for a few minutes to contemplate a landscape, a sunset, a sunrise, etc., is an act of rebellion, becoming “unproductive” becomes a stoic act. >>. Continue reading
2022
The photographic act as a return to the sublime
by PhD Héctor Fabián García
This project ponders on the aesthetic dilemma of the immediacy of contemporary image production, which currently seems to displace the moment of the sublime to focus solely on the beautiful, thus tearing apart the aesthetic reflection that is developed through technique and the technical-analytical faculty, which the artist develops when trying to capture a transcendent image. >> Continue reading
2021
Studies of reality
by MPhil Luis Alberto Matus
Engaging on a perception from a material, electronic, symbolic or digital environment, implies that the participant assumes itself (I, perceptive unit) as an hybrid component of an interactive construction in which the subject and the object are arranged on a similar axiological plane.
Thus, the identifiable cause of a phenomenon, which as a device (virtual or material), must show the complexity of what is perceived by the subject.
The virtual world does not simulate the natural world in this way (or does it?) from a perspective in which the images are semiotized as the perception of what it is understood as “real”.
In this study of “reality”, the undifferentiated understanding of time and space can be considered an important basis for the emergence of a new perception of nature that is expressed through digital means. >> Continue reading
2017
Doubting the obvious: modernity and the ready made after a century of Duchamp's Fountain
by Mylene Zozaya-Tinoco
In 1863, Baudelaire claimed that Modernity is “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, that which is half art and the other half eternal or immutable.”
Let us place this expression alongside Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain.
To begin establishing relationships between them, we must first consider Modernity: a notion that not only defines a historical period but also transcended as a conceptual category encompassing the framework of aesthetic emancipation. From a temporal perspective, Modernity has fostered various interpretations: in a broad sense, it spans from the 15th century to the first half of the 20th century, and for some, it is still debatable whether it has ended. We can mention as major milestones influencing our analysis: the discovery of the Americas, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the overthrow of monarchies, and the rise of capitalism.
Modernity has been a period of vast transformations in social, political, and economic fields, which accumulated as fissures paving the way for what we now recognize as the great revolution of modern art. >> Continue reading