ANDREW RAFACZ continues 2015 with SUFFOCATED FROM THE INSIDE, a solo exhibition of new works by Ivan LOZANO. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition continues through July 25, 2015.

“the world is not worthy of words / they have been suffocated from the inside”

Referencing a line in the last poem written by Mexican poet and activist Javier Sicilia after the murder of his son at the hands of Mexican drug cartels in 2011, Ivan LOZANO’s newest body of work is an exploration of these ongoing personal horrors.  While Sicilia lamented he had “no more poetry” in him, LOZANO confiscates (to borrow a term used by Craig Owens to describe appropriated imagery in The Allegorical Impulse) and collages manifestations of images of cartel executions in Mexico to recover a potential visual poetry hiding behind the documentation of tragedy.

The preferred medium for LOZANO’s collages is clear packing tape, a literal film where these digital images are materialized. He manipulates and abstracts these terrifying images into more natural or quotidian forms –a landscape, a mountain, a sun, a pattern, a decorative chain, a lamp.  Each tape strip begins as a laserjet print, which the artist covers with packing tape and then carefully rubs away the cellulose with his fingers – a labor intensive and meditative process he likens to handling the beads while praying a rosary. At times macabre, this work never succumbs to shock value, instead encouraging a deepened visual relationship, recognizing the potential for something sublime in the face of the abject.

For this exhibition, the artist presents a selection of his photographs, a tape collage on a flat screen monitor and hanging sculptures that also incorporate his handmade transparencies.

IVAN LOZANO (Mexican b. 1981) lives and works in Chicago, where NewCity Art recognized him as a “Breakout Artist” in 2014. He received a bachelor’s degree in Film from the University of Texas at Austin and a MFA in Film/Video/NewMedia/Animation from SAIC. Before graduate school, LOZANO was the programming director for the Cinematexas International Short Film festival, co-founder of a feminist video collective (Austin Video Bee) and a net art blog, CTRL+W33D. His videos have been exhibited nationally and internationally and his work has been shown at the Texas Biennial (09 and 13), FotoFest’s Talent in Texas series (Houston, TX), The Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL), Arlington Arts Center (Arlington, VA), Texas State University Galleries (San Marcos, TX) and others. In 2013 he founded a PDF artist press, IMAGE FILE PRESS, dedicated to presenting artist books, zines, and other digital ephemera.

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Tags: andrew rafacz, Ivan Lozano, West Loop