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PAST EXHIBITION
Juan Downey: Meditation Drawings
October 31, 2007—December 1, 2007
Press Release
From June 1976 to August 1977 Juan Downey lived with his family in the Amazon jungle. He spent nine months with the Yanomami Indians, one of the largest and most primitive tribes that still exist.
During his stay with the Yanomamis, Downey practiced daily meditation. Afterward, he would “draw” a meditation, one a day, in that semi-conscious state between sleep and awakening. The 34 drawings in this exhibition are examples of this extraordinary phase of his life. They are meditations themselves. Using pencil, colored pencils and graphite, the artist extracts the essence of life and its energy force. Circles, lines, spirals and curves are drawn free-hand with an assurance that gives a sense of righteousness to the world around, enticing the viewer to enter this pure world in which he lived.
Even though small in scale, these drawings extend beyond the surface of the paper, entering our own space and drawing us into a world of energy. Energy has been a main factor in Downey’s work throughout his career, from his first paintings in Paris in 1964, to his first experiments with light and sound, to cybernetics, to his machines that recreate the passage of electric energy, to the camera and video energy, to the vital force that is life. Concentric clockwise or counterclockwise circles diffuse their energy, visually attracting us and entering our inner self thus engaging us in our own meditation and allowing us to enter another state of consciousness.
Two of Downey’s videos – THE LAUGHING ALLIGATOR and THE ABANDONED SHABONO created during his stay with the Yanomamis will be shown at the gallery on
Thursday November 16, at 6:30 and 7:30
The Laughing Alligator, 1979, 27 min, b&w and color, sound
Merging the subjective and the objective, the autobiographical and the anthropological, The Laughing Alligator is a highly personal observation of an indigenous South American culture. Recorded while he and his family were living among the Yanomami of Venezuela, this compelling work distills Downey's search for his own cultural identity and heritage through the encounter between the Western family and the so-called "primitive" tribe. Challenging the anthropological view of the Yanomami as violent cannibals, Downey focuses on the tribe's myths, rituals and ceremonies, documenting funerary rites in which tribal members eat the pulverized ashes of their dead to insure their immortality. Subverting conventional modes of ethnographic documentary, Downey participates as an active presence, "shooting" with his video camera as a means of creating an interactive dialogue between artist and subject and addressing his own "yearning for a purer existence."
The Abandoned Shabono, 1976, 27 mn.
In pursuit of the last primitive tribe of the Americas, Juan Downey’s ‘The Abandoned Shabono’ focuses on the Amazon Rain Forest. The shabono is the circular communal dwelling built by the Yanomami Indians. The artist presents the building as a metaphor for the social structure and spiritual environment of an ecologically sound culture that is threatened by advancing civilization.
In 2001 at the 49th Venice Biennale, Downey was awarded an Honorable Mention for Excellence in Art, Science and Technology for his video: (About Cages) Plateau of Humankind, Chilean Pavilion, in Venice, Italy.
Downey was born in Santiago, Chile in 1940 and died in 1993. He received a B.A. in Architecture from the Catholic University of Chile, and studied at S.W. Hayter's Atelier 17 in Paris and Pratt Institute in New York. Downey received numerous awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. He acted as associate professor in both the School of Architecture and the media department at Pratt Institute. His videotapes, drawings, performances and installations have been exhibited in solo shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Jewish Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; International Center of Photography, New York; Leo Castelli Gallery, New York; and most recently at IVAM. Downey's work has also been included in group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany; seven Whitney Biennials, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Venice Biennale representing both the United States and Chile ; and the World Wide Video Festival, The Hague among others. In 1998 IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez, in Valencia, Spain hosted a major retrospective of Downey's extensive body of work. His work is in numerous museum collections worldwide.
A catalogue with text by Valerie Smith will be published in conjunction with the exhibition
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