Been a long time that I attended an art exhibition opening in Ottawa.
Today was the day for City Hall Art Gallery.‘s Manila-Acapulco featuring works by Marisa Gallemit, Claudia Gutierrez & Guillermo Trejo.
About the exhibition:
The Manila-Acapulco Galleon Trade Route was officially established in 1565.
Spanish navigators had been charged with finding a route from the Philippines, an island region claimed by Spain some forty years earlier, to Mexico, which had been conquered in 1521.
The new trade route remained active until 1815, extending the umbilical cord between Spain and its colonies by tethering the Asian archipelago to American channels of commerce and communication.
This exhibition invokes this historical juncture – a particularly poignant period when the artists’ countries of origin converged – while also proposing an alternative fold in the fabric of the surrounding narrative.
Rather than evoking a linear course plotted between two disparate points, the exhibition triangulates Marisa Gallemit, Claudia Gutierrez and Guillermo Trejo, creating a trine in which two entities are relied upon to locate the third.
Individually, each employ process-based techniques that at once interpret their ancestral lineage and conceive of new understandings of it within the present. Plaited together, the three artists reshape traditional material hierarchies, redirect flows of information and remake ancient objects as a way of reorienting towards the future.
– Excerpt by Rhiannon Vogl
The exhibition runs until October 3, 2021.
Check out the vernissage photos.
