Not wild, but still life

LA CHAMBRE BLANCHE welcomes the Mexican artist Nancy Samara Guzmán Fernández for a site-specific residency from September 2 to December 21. The opening of ‘’ Not wild, but still life ’’ will take place on November 27 2014 in the centre’s exhibition. Guzmán Fernández centers her work on bureaucracy; this arm of the government that should be helping the people gain access to services, but that, more often than not, crushes us under the inescapable weight of paper forms to be filled. Guzmán Fernández has started this research in Mexico in February 2014 with her work entitled Regrese Mañana (come back tomorrow). In that instance Guzmán Fernández had created a bureaucratic space complete with security guards, the public had to fill in forms in order to gain access to the exhibition. They were systematically told to ‘’come back tomorrow ‘’. In Quebec City, Nancy Samara Guzmán Fernández started her work with some bureaucratic tourism (a visit of several government buildings) seeking the aesthetic involved in the City’s bureaucracy. She visited several buildings and was finally charmed by the Marie-Guyart building, better known in Quebec City, as the Complexe G. It became her guiding light, her monolith. In only one day she went up and down the 30 levels of the building, research its’ history, immersed herself in its particular aesthetic. She marvelled at the profusion of plants kept alive not by Mother Nature but by the employees roaming the place on the daytime. In the company of her partner Rodrigo Frías Becerra, she imagines the space coming alive once empty of human presence. She proposes an installation of photographs, paintings and paper sculpture, a universe where plants, furniture and other symbols of bureaucracy come alive at night in a dream-like state. The public is invited to dive into a slightly askew bureaucratic, almost Kafkaesque, installation. Following their findings both artists come to the conclusion that the Quebec government is maternal in its essence, while the Mexican government is more like an absent an abusive father. We must add that thinking of their 43 brothers and sisters missing, both artists insisted to include this sentence in the press release: ‘’We want to know where are the 43 students’’. There is not doubt that the shadow of these missing students will hover over this work in progress.