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Arts Featured Visual Art

Mutations nds inspiration in the

immigrant experience
3 months ago by Michelle Falk Add Comment

A look at Jos Luis Torres art exhibit Mutations

This is the laboratory. Every space is the laboratory, Jos Luis Torres says.

The Montral-based artist arrived in Edmonton a week before the opening reception of his
exhibit Mutations without a single work started, much less completed. The exhibit space is
his blank canvas. He has ideas, measurements, some materials and an empty gallery. Inspired
by Marcel Duchamp and Gordon Matta-Clark, Torres creates each exhibit spontaneously and
site-specically, using everyday found objects from wherever he is working. His materials
are donated by people in the community or purchased from thrift stores.

Torres describes the constantly evolving creation process of Mutations as an allegory for his
lifethat of an immigrant and a Canadian. His work has been tremendously impacted by his
experience of immigrating to Quebec from Argentina in 2000. Je suis Canadien, Torres
says, but addsas translated by Latitude 53s executive director Todd Janesthat he is also
Argentinian. In his work, he explores the multiplicity of belonging to two places. His project
juggles the duality of critiquing a place and living in it.

The message VIVRE RESISTIR ? DREAM shines on the gallery wall. For Torres, this is
the essence of his and all immigrants experience: to live (in French, the language of his
new home), to resist (in Spanish, the language of his rst home), continually questioning
and keeping hope. He describes how in order to be an immigrant you must live in a state of
resistance, keeping who you are while navigating how to merge into your new place.

Below that message, the oor is covered with dozens of area rugs overlapping each other
like a patchwork quilt. The patterns in these mats have been reclaimedfrom Aztec,
aboriginal and Arabic culturesand mass-produced all over the world.

[Its] the idea of cultural appropriation, or how we have new realities of Canada, Torres
explains. Theres so much different cultural iconography that is considered Canadian. How
we dene what Canada is has evolved.
Torres explains that he is taking the banality, the commonality and the simple aspects of the
work and allowing an esthetic to develop throughout it. The materials are here, and I am
making a conversation with them, help[ing] the materials speak new realities.
Every aspect of how Torres creates is essential to the themes he is working through. He starts
from scratchjust as a new immigrant doesrecreating the exhibit as a newcomer does
their life.
The process is very important; there is no nal work, but the process, Torres says, noting
that the time pressure and the spontaneity are essential to the work. There is no comfort. For
me, its very importantto survive, it is necessary to be creating.
Until Sat, May 23
Works by Jos Luis Torres

Latitude 53

#art process #Jos Luis Torres #Latitude 53 #Mutations #Mutations Edmonton

#patchwork quilt #Visual Art Edmonton

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