Identity today is anything but monolithic. Post-Black and Post-Latin American, for example, were concepts intrinsic to exhibitions presented in the beginning of the second millennium. Titled Freestyle (2001) and Ultra-Baroque (2000), respectively, these exhibitions proposed that any demographic or constituency is much too heterogeneous and nuanced to be adequately represented by the singularity of a totalizing narrative with its subtext of universality. For there are many factors that come into play that resist essentialist categorization making the notion of a Latin American aesthetic as nothing more than generalization. The variegated geo-cultural differences between Bolivians and Argentinians, for instance, necessitate a framing of subjectivity as being shaped as much by class, gender, and sexual orientation as by nationality.
But there is also less affirmative notion of identity as having been unconsciously constructed and manipulated from without. The Marxian commodity fetish, by which a product is de-sublimated from want to a need, creates the ideal consumer perpetually seeking that external material object to fulfill the human existential void. Other philosophers have even described addictions, religion or the desire for membership to a particular class or political party, as falsely created needs where individuals behave like ghosts in a machine or in regards to the current exhibition, as having their “bodies snatched.”
Consisting of painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation and works-on-paper, BODY SNATCHERS is an exhibition that focuses on the mutability of identity as well as the constructs by which agency is given form including the material and immaterial factors listed above. Although the works in BODY SNATCHERS are highly individuated in form and concept, they coalesce around the instability of a contemporary self that is protean and configured through myriad contexts from both within and without, both consciously and unconsciously