A Taste of Colombia

Rice Gallery Winter Exhibitions

Adriana Arenas Ilian’s The Precious Stone and Gold Factory infused Rice Gallery with a seemingly tropical environment in which all was not as it first appeared. As a Colombian artist living in New York, Arenas Ilian played with stereotypes and assumptions that sometimes confront Latin American artists in the international art world.

Visitors were lured into the gallery by the soundtrack of the exhibition, which was an example of vallenato, a lively and passionate form of music that hails from Colombia’s northeast coastal region. Immediately on entering the gallery, the viewer encountered a large thatched hut that suffused the entire gallery with the aroma of palm fronds. Fitted with a moving disco light and a karaoke-style monitor that displayed the lyrics of the soundtrack, the hut seemed to evoke the ambiance of a coastal Colombian nightspot. For Arenas Ilian, however, the disco environment was like any to be found and imitated throughout the world—as a favorite example, she cited a Bulgarian bar in New York with a similar beach-party aesthetic! Moreover, the palm fronds were found locally in Houston, rather than imported from a tropical paradise.

Beyond the hut, a lovely sunrise image was continuously projected onto the rear gallery wall. In this as well, appearances were deceiving. The image changed so gradually that it appeared to be a photograph, and it was only when the digitally created, oversized glare effects began to glide across the image that the viewer would sense it was actually a video. While viewers might assume from the rose and orange of the image that the sunset was shot on a tropical beach, it was in fact taped in an upscale New England neighborhood. This was another instance of Arenas Ilian’s interest in “things that look like they belong to one culture, but . . . are really very globalized.” Inset into the sunrise image, a small LCD monitor displayed a war-game-like video that the artist created in a playful evocation of the violence of her country, providing a striking counterpoint to the tranquil sunrise.

In the rear corner, a shimmering silver Mylar curtain enclosed a bank of four small LCD monitors that displayed animated video images digitally manipulated by the artist. The mesmerizing images of a midnight sky punctuated by artificial, digitally created stars and of fruits and flowers spinning into unrecognizable swirls evoked a fantastical myth that Arenas Ilian invented to underlie the installation. In the myth, the main character devises a machine to transform the beauty of natural, living things into the material wealth of precious stones and gold.

For Arenas Ilian, all of the installation’s components functioned together as a kind of metaphorical factory that enticed the viewer into contemplation of love and its clichés. Arenas Ilian was born in Pereira, Colombia, and educated in Bogotá, London, and New York. Accordingly, The Precious Stone and Gold Factory, like many of her other works, was tinged with nostalgia and a fascination with the difficulties of cultural translation.

—Maria Stalford