Revolutions Generators
exhibition by Ismael de Anda III & Eugene Ahn
About the exhibition
Revolutions Generators is an installation utilizing digital technology, investigating notions of territorialization/ re-territorialization/ de-territorialization, which intersects imagery from the U.S./Mexico Gateway where Ismael de Anda III was raised, incorporating augmented reality features and aerial imagery, including de Anda’s ancestral family farm on the banks of the Rio Grande/ Rio Bravo River on the hinge of the U.S./ Mexico Gateway, and Berlin, organized by interactive media artist Eugene Ahn. REVOLUTIONS GENERATORS incorporates elements of de Anda & Ahn’s ongoing project where re-imagined digital silhouettes of the brutal metal turnstiles used at the U.S/Mexico point of exchange are transformed into antennae-like, satellite-esque, levitating forms that are symbolically, forcefully yanked out of the ground, removed as barriers, and released into the air as liberated, freely flying, spinning entities.
The installation features a collection of twenty-five digital collages printed on aluminum, mixing a collection of lands that de Anda and Ahn have visited and imagine. The individual aluminum prints are hung on a grid to produce a larger collective design, revealing a puzzled together image of the metallic pronged, cramped, spinning turnstiles used at U.S/Mexico points of entry to herd/usher people across imposed boundary lines.
These “Revolutions Generators” forms are visible within the digital collage and as hanging sculptural silhouettes, as well as an augmented reality feature where animated Revolutions Generators can be virtually superimposed throughout the exhibition, the gallery’s immediately surrounding areas, throughout Berlin, and beyond, extending outward to wherever the viewer may travel or inhabit.
De Anda was raised in El Paso, Texas, a place that was once a city with a river running through it. After a land treaty, the city was split into two countries. For Revolutions Generators, de Anda and Ahn consider relationships shared with Berlin as a place that was once divided and the presence of the Panke River in comparison with the shifting Rio Grande River/ Rio Bravo River flowing between Texas and Mexico.
Artists
Ismael de Anda III born in El Paso, Texas, works and lives in Los Angeles. Using mutant practices, including digital photo-collage, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and interactive, site-specific projects, Ismael de Anda III’s work is inspired by his pluralistic upbringing on the U.S./Mexico Gateway and now living in Los Angeles. He has exhibited his work internationally, including AOC F58 Galleria Bruno Lisi, Rome, La Estacíón Arte Contemporáneo, Chihuahua, Mexico, Youkobo, Tokyo, Supermarket 2022 Art Fair in Stockholm, Soulangh Cultural Park, Jiali District, Tainan, Taiwan, and the U.S. including the Torrance Art Museum, Lux Art Institute, and Durden and Ray where he is a member. Recently de Anda has participated in several online virtual and drive-thru exhibitions. Lectures of his work include the 2020 International Textile and Apparel Conference and as a visiting artist for CalArts and Los Angeles City College in 2021. De Anda is the recipient of a California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists. Often de Anda’s works are site-specific, inspired by the communities in which they are created, using locally sourced materials.
Eugene Ahn – lives and works in Los Angeles. Eugene Ahn explores the intersections of material and virtual by creating systems and experiences that question modes of perceiving, thinking, and being. His work is interactive, immersive, and personal, with an interdisciplinary approach that attempts to understand and critique norms from a holistic position. Leveraging logic, math, story, and myth, Ahn seeks to re-engineer the encounter with the visual, the textual, architecture, object, Internet, and the very notion of idea. For more than two decades as an information architect and web developer, Ahn has created content management solutions for arts and education, supported music album marketing campaigns for the record industry, and built software managing global supply chain production in the apparel manufacturing industry. He has created web-based technology to deliver publishing and collaboration tools by and for youth and for the global diaspora of the exploited and victimized, including HIV/AIDS orphans and war survivors.
De Anda and Ahn have collaborated on the following projects and exhibitions: Revolutions Generators for the Visual and Media Arts Gallery at Los Angeles City College, Revolutions Generator Evolutions for the exhibition Betwixt and/or Between at the Angels Gate Cultural Center Gallery, San Pedro, California, Revolutions Generator Re-evolutions for the event High Beams 5 held on the rooftop for Los Angeles’ downtown historic Bendix building, QiPo Art Fair, Mexico City, Disparate Alleys, Gallery70, Tirana, Albania, TIEZE, Durden and Ray, Los Angeles, Melting Furnace, Galleria Rankka, Helsinki, and Mestizo Dispossessed, AOC F58 Galleria Bruno Lisi, Rome, as a satellite exhibition for the Pera + Flora + Fauna collateral event of 59th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. The Revolutions Generators augmented reality feature has been experienced in San Pedro and Los Angeles, California, USA, Mexico City, Tirana, Albania, Helsinki, Finland, Rome and Venice, Italy, Bath, London, and Stonehenge, England, Taiwan, and Kassel and Berlin, Germany.