KCRW
Pablo Rasgado and ‘Las Chingaderas’
Hunter Drohojowska-Philp
October 5, 2017
The wall, that Trumpian threat and promise, figures prominently in many shows for this fall’s LA/Latin America version of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time, or PST. At Steve Turner Gallery in Hollywood, Mexico City-based artist Pablo Rasgado has constructed his own versions of such boundaries in an exhibition titled This Too Shall Pass.
Rasgado’s has worked with reconstructed walls for some time. Here the walls establish a maze of open-ended rooms. One side of each wall is covered in a cracked mosaic of industrial drywall. This material is in fact the remnants of past shows, gallery walls removed from the Museum of Modern Art in Antwerp and the Carillo Gil Museum in Mexico City. The dusty white surfaces are repurposed at the gallery in what Rasgado calls “unfolded architecture.” The presence of these walls brings to mind their previous history as physical support for cultural ideas. Each wall also stands as a work by Rasgado.
The artist complicates the implications by hanging some of these walls with art by others artists who are mostly from LA. The selections tangentially address issues of history, perspective and impermanence. Tim Hawkinson’s World Clock (2012) is an open medicine chest with objects such as dental floss, nail clippers and pill bottle wired to function as actual clocks clicking away the seconds.
Brian Rochefort covers terracotta pots or skulls with layers of ceramic glaze and glass. Gustavo Godoy stacks cast concrete fragments that look like the blocks used by architect Frank Lloyd Wright in his Mayan-influenced buildings. Like Rasgado, many of the artists re-purpose materials with symbolic intent. Rasgado, himself, includes one work of a single penny imprinted with the memorable words, “This too shall pass.” Life and its interpretations are never finite but art carries on. The show continues to October 28.
