VERSUS:
MIGUEL MONROY

Mexico City, August 4 – September 1, 2005

Miguel Monroy’s first solo show at Art&Idea is refreshing; it makes us question our use of everyday objects. The exhibition includes his most recent work: video, sculpture and photography as products derived from leisure. The video piece that gives the name to the exhibition shows an electric escalator that goes up while a metallic spring worm goes down. The video appears to be endless because it is on a loop and shows a relation between two objects that work against themselves, and feed off each other at the same time. Monroy’s pieces are examples of a work method based on the repetition of paired objects that develop relations with infinite possibilities. For example: Equivalente (Equivalent), in which the artist shows one hundred ten money transaction receipts received over three days. He changed one thousand Mexican pesos to US dollars and then changed them back to pesos, back and forth, again and again, until the money ran out; or Murmullo (Whisper): a circle made of pistol grip megaphones, each one magnifying the sound of the preceding one. A third example is Contrareloj (Counterclockwise): a wall clock modified by attaching another clock mechanism to the back of the first clock. This mechanism makes the whole clock rotate counterclockwise so that, even when the clock is working, the seconds hand always remains in the same place. While time moves forward, the whole clock itself goes back. In Monroy’s words, the intention of the show is similar to a childhood game based on the repetition of a well-known word, which loses its meaning as the repetition continues. At the end of the process, the word that once was familiar suddenly appears as a new and unknown word.