Miler Lagos: Home

September 12 - October 15, 2011

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

Magnan Metz Gallery is proud to announce Home, the first US show for Colombian artist Miler Lagos.  Home will be on view from September 8 – October 15, 2011 with an artist reception Thursday, September 15th from 6-8pm.

Miler Lagos’ installations, collages and interventions are known for their play on material properties, often engaging with local environmental or specific political concerns.  For Home Lagos reflects on his stay in Manhattan during a recent Location One residency.  The front gallery space is dedicated to Igloo , a 11 feet domed structure constructed from a selection of books from a defunct US Navy base library. The layers of foreign language dictionaries, medical reference series, geographical studies and psychology volumes are laid like bricks along a cylindrical shape. The resulting structure is an outer white shell created by the condensed paper pages, while the interior reveals a patchwork of colorful bindings.  For Lagos, the igloo symbolizes a place where the Eskimos transfer knowledge from generation to generation.  It is a shelter to protect from Nature’s ferocity.  At the same time, however, it is also a fragile building, as tenuous as our own existence.  Understanding how Nature works is a human need for countless reasons, such as prevention, control and intervention, but in the end Nature can also teach us new lessons.  Igloo serves to remind us of the delicate balance at play between Nature and Culture. 

Along the back wall of the gallery Lagos’s video Water House (2011) plays on a looped projection.  During his stay in Manhattan, Lagos was struck by the numerous water towers he observed dotting the city’s skyline, “The structures look like small huts from the Sierra Nevada, which are made with cone roofs of straw, and their cylindrical wall of clay and wood.  The similarity inspired the idea of water tank as home.”  In Water House this concept is conveyed as the purpose of the water tank is inverted:  the walls block out liquid instead of retaining it, transforming the structure into a refuge for human life rather than water.  We are left to consider the basic qualities—both material and immaterial—that creates a home environment: shelter, space, security, a sense of belonging.  A fanciful quality is also prevalent in the piece, as we imagine a foreign, pre-industrialized region existing atop the buzzing metropolis of Manhattan.

The second video, LAT. 55.31 N LONG 114.13W (2011), was supported by AB Projects in Toronto. The video was recorded from a plane flying upwards of 20,000 feet in the uninhabited Canadian arctic. 
 
Miler Lagos (b. Bogotá, 1973) received his degree in Fine Arts from the National University of Colombia in 2002.  He had a art residency at Location One in New York (2011), also he had a residencies at Gasworks in London in 2009 and AB PROJECTS in Toronto in 2010. He has shown in exhibitions and Biennials throughout Latin America including Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico and Brazil as well as the University of Pennsylvania as part of Philagrafika 2010, His work is in the Colombian collections of the Republic Bank of Colombia, Museum of Antioquia, Gilberto Alzate Avendaño Foundation, and in the international collections of the Rubell Family Collection, Ella Fontanals Cisneros Foundation and National Collection of The Puertorrican Culture Institute among others.  Miler Lagos lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia.

For more information or images please contact the gallery at info@magnanmetz.com or 212-244-2344