NYAB Event - Pedro Lasch "Black Mirror/Espejo Negro"

Pedro Lasch "Black Mirror/Espejo Negro"

Stephan Stoyanov Gallery

This event has ended.

Black Mirror/Espejo Negro is the culmination of three ambitious projects produced over the past year.

The first project consists of a new site-specific installation created by Lasch for Luxe Gallery's storefront windows. Facing Stanton Street, black mirrors with almost invisible images will confront passersby on an everyday basis, even as the gallery is closed. Gallery viewers and pedestrians will see their faces reflected in ghostly figures and imaginary buildings gradually appearing from under the glass. Reflections of the interior and exterior architecture of the actual surroundings will also become part of these fleeting pictures. Post-colonial theory and aesthetics, ongoing immigration debates, and current ideas around latinidad will frame this public visual dialogue in the intensely cosmopolitan context of New York City and the specific tensions between Loisaida and the Lower East Side.

In addition to the site-specific installation, the show at Luxe will include selections from five archival suites of large-scale photographs produced by Lasch in relation to his grand, yet ephemeral installation currently on view at the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham in North Carolina (May 22, 2008 through Jan. 18, 2009). Commissioned by the museum to accompany its blockbuster exhibitions El Greco to Velazquez (Fall 2008) and Escultura Social: Contemporary Art from Mexico City (Spring 2009) this work incorporates sixteen pre-Columbian figures from the museum's permanent collection, placing them in front of black reflective panels through which images of Spanish old master paintings are just visible. Museum visitors also see their own faces reflected on the same glass panels. The photographs shown at Luxe capture different processes and experiences at play in the Nasher installation. They also provide the foundation for the third and last project for Black Mirror/Espejo Negro, an artist's book to be launched in Spring 2009. Co-produced by Luxe Gallery and the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, the book includes high quality images, writings by the artist, as well as critical essays by art critics and social theorists.

Pedro Lasch was born and raised in Mexico City, and has since lived in New York (NY) and Durham, (NC), where he teaches art and art theory at the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. He has been Director of Latino/a Studies at Duke, and is now their Community Liaison. He is also the founder and former director of the bilingual experimental program 'Art, Story-Telling, and the Five Senses' in New York. Lasch collaborates frequently with immigrant organizations and art collectives, especially 16 Beaver Group.