PEANA OFF-SITE
CASA ORTEGA LUIS BARRAGÁN, CDMX, MX.
Saturday, May 1st
1:00 – 1:30 pm
Casa Ortega Luis Barragán
Mexico City
PEANA is pleased to present the work of Gordon Hall in the context of the activities of Zona MACO 2021 Art Week in Mexico City.
As a sculptor, performer and writer, Gordon Hall examines the personal, relational and political effects of the way we relate to objects and to each other. On this occasion, the artist presents The Number of Inches Between Them (2018/2021); composed of two concrete sculptures, a performance, and a takeaway poster featuring an image with an undeliverable letter from Hall, this project is now set to temporarily inhabit the spaces of Luis Barragán’s Casa Ortega in the Tacubaya neighborhood.
Hall’s sculptures consist of two replicas of a bench made in the mid-1980s by the largely unknown and now deceased artist Dennis Croteau, who was a victim of AIDS 1989. The artist recreated the bench twice, assembling one of them as originally found, and leaving the other disassembled with its concrete components: a body taken apart and put together. The performance features the artist and four people in their seventies and eighties who sit on this bench and use it in a variety of ways.
The intimacy and closeness that the artist establishes with Croteau’s piece –through actions, correspondence, and the exact recreation of the object– thus becomes a way of reflecting on support and care, continuing his interest in the relationships that our own bodies establish with objects and furniture in the face of illness, fatigue, or vulnerability.