Electronic media comes and goes, but books are forever.
That seems to be the point of Ruben Millares’ Art & Culture Center exhibition “Mother Pages.” The artist’s primary medium is a bedraggled paperback copy of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a title that is hardly incidental to his mission statement. It is, after all, a banned book about banned books.
Like the tomes burned in Bradbury’s dystopia, Millares destroyed his copy, but for more cerebral means: He smothered its pages on and around the exposed guts of computer circuitry—knobs, gears, bands, bulbs, plugs, cylinders, circuit boards. These elements are organized in vitrines, under glass, like museum pieces or scale models. Also included in the gallery is a collage of the remnants of Fahrenheit, the pieces unused in the installations—brilliant pages painfully, and indiscrimately, damaged.
“Mother Pages,” the most interesting of the five exhibitions the A&CC unveiled last weekend, opens up a myriad of interpretations. Does it represent a Pollyanna’s view of the future, where books will not out only outlive their digital contemporaries but literally bury them under their words, despite evidence that each generation reads less print media than the one before it? Does it suggest its own dystopian future, where books are little more than relics of a bygone era, encased in glass and as inaccessible as the Ark of the Covenant?
If you’re not sure what you’re looking at, the materials in “Mother Pages” resemble bomb-making equipment recovered from a lunatic’s bunker. By engulfing them in Bradbury’s words, can the piece be saying that books themselves are as powerful and influential as weapons?
“Mother Pages” implies all of this and more, and its unique presentation—in the dimly lit second gallery, with black curtains separating the space from the other exhibitions—suggests an exhibit whose very ideas are secretive, dangerous or contraband. It’s quite an accomplishment.
In the main gallery, the work of Nereida Garcia Ferraz is no less implacable, if more vibrant. A Havana-born émigré who relocated to the U.S. in 1970, Ferraz works in media including painting, photography, sculpture and video, most of which are on display in the A&CC’s exhibit “As Close As You Want.”
It’s an interesting title for an exhibit whose works do seem to change perspective and meaning when viewed up close—where they become abstract expressions of lines of color—and from afar, where they offer visions of modern metropolises and architecture that radiate with a primitive, if motley colored, wonder. Her paintings feel brightly askew, like the cubist structures in “After Night Sound,” and the angular, postmodern edifices of “Inside/Outside” and “City After City.” It’s a way of seeing the world that is fully removed from objective reality, pulsating instead with the illogic of dreams.
“As Close as You Want” is an inviting, generous exhibit that offers an all-encompassing view of the artist’s personality through a simulation of her studio. In addition to the paintings, there are cardboard maquettes of buildings in the gallery’s center, many of which reappear in “60 Etudes,” a series of small, square visions of buildings, chairs and other objects, which may or may not manifest again in her paintings. “Morning Prayers” is a series of hypnotic mandala-like vortexes drawn in walnut ink on antique paper, adding a spiritual component to the dreamlike modernity of the artist’s oils.
On your way out of the Center, don’t miss Jean-Paul Mallozzi’s “Familiars,” an exhibit full enough to present the artist’s coherent theme but small enough to leave you wanting more. Love between two men is seen is both tender and verboten in the majority of the graphite drawings and oil paintings, which focus on the embraces of male figures whose faces—and by association identities—are erased and replaced with nebulous paint smudges. At a time when LGBTQ rights are continually being erased in courts, it’s pretty sobering stuff.
All of these exhibitions and more run through May 29 at Art & Culture Center, 1650 Harrison St., Hollywood. Admission costs $7 adults and $4 students, seniors and children. Call 954/921-3274 or visit artandculturecenter.org.
