Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento
Structures For A Wall & Floor: Blinky's Cave, Baldo's Chapel, Ellsworth's Profile, Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento, 2007, Pencil on Paper, 48" x 60"
Structures For A Wall & Floor: Blinky's Cave, Baldo's Chapel, Ellsworth's Profile, Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento, 2007, Mixed Media on Paper, 56" x 46", Edition of 1
Featured in if something has to change, September 2007.
Structures For A Wall & Floor:
Blinky's Cave, Baldo's Chapel, Ellsworth's Profile
Detroit, alphabets, objects to be constructed, paradise, concrete, carriages, fixtures, containers. As punctuation, innocent of all meaning, these structures work not so much to define the events that take place around them, but to identify and situate actions that are not necessarily events.
Both the event and time have thereby been re-conceived. In a historicist vision of the past, present and future, time moved inexorably towards a goal; events, like little works of art, followed each other in quick and slow succession, and derived their contours, limits, meaning and relative importance from the unbreakable thread of time.
Shotgun Space has expanded its space to five times its original size in order to present structures installed by Clandestine Construction Company International (CLANCCO) on private and public sites across the United States, allowing us to discover for the first time in Los Angeles one of the multiple facets of CLANCCO corporation's oeuvre and life.
In each of the eight steps of this exhibition, the tour will reveal eight sculptures installed by CLANCCO between the year 2000 and 2007. Together with eight drawings, they form structural remains which deny the thrust of historical force, depriving events of both their form and meaning in such a context.
Bio
Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento is an artist, writer, and lecturer interested in cultural production stemming from the discursive sites of art, law, and philosophy.
His work has been shown in national and international exhibitions, including Mexico, Germany, Spain, Dallas, New York City, and Los Angeles, and has published essays and projects in Five Continents and One City Exhibition (catalogue essay, Mexico), Capital Art: On the Culture of Punishment (catalogue essay, US), Cabinet Magazine (US), and Law Text Culture (Australia).
His most recent project, Clandestine Construction Company International (CLANCCO), uses corporate strategies to engage the discursive sites of law and cultural production. CLANCCO places a special emphasis on the intervention and understanding of real property, public/private space, intellectual property, and pedagogy through the artistic practices known as sculpture and drawing. In 2007, CLANCCO was awarded a SwingSpace Grant by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council to install a project dealing with art and pedagogy, and its projects will be including in the upcoming Land Grab exhibition at Apex Art this coming winter.
Sarmiento has previously taught at Harvard University, the University of Southern California, California Institute of the Arts, Occidental College, and the University of California at Irvine, and has lectured and presented papers in the United States and abroad, most recently at Columbia Law School, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The School of Visual Arts, The Department of Visual Studies at SUNY-Buffalo, Cornell Law School, and the Centre Sociologie de l'Innovation, Ecole des Mines de Paris.
Sarmiento received his BA in Art from the University of Texas-El Paso in 1995, and was awarded a Philip Morris Fellowship to attend the California Institute of the Arts, where he received his MFA in Art in 1997. He was a Van Lier Fellow at the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program in Studio Art the following year. He received his J.D. from Cornell Law School in 2006. He is currently Director of Education and staff attorney with Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts in New York City, and teaches Contemporary Art at Hofstra University.
