AFTER NATURE
Rocío Olivares & Nicolás Rupcich

May 11 – June 16, 2019

Cindy Rucker Gallery is pleased to present AFTER NATURE featuring works by Rocío Olivares and Nicolás Rupcich. Comprised of video pieces, the exhibition addresses the asymmetrical distribution of power and resources in the global contemporary landscape.

In a period of refugee crises, accelerated climate change, and rising technological advancements, Olivares and Rupcich explore the relation between mankind and geographic environments by focusing on artificial locations. Taking herons and the members and workers of a private resort as subjects and filming them in vastly different and distant settings, each video portrays a situation of isolation and loneliness as the byproduct of imperial expansion, colonization, and fetishization.

In Rupcich’s Big Pool, palm trees, crystal-clear water, and white-sand beaches are the symbols of a paradise individually purchased and consummated outside the framework of time and space. In Olivares’s Cattle Egrets, the simulation of nature represents the displacement of a species, as its territory is clearly delimitated. Paradoxically, both works render the presence of human beings as anecdotal or uninvolved, despite their clear responsibility in driving out who or whatever previously inhabited the landscape.

In AFTER NATURE, transformations of flora and fauna are taken as allegories of historical struggles between peoples and cultures, as well as the intrinsic contradiction between the individual and the physical world. Appropriating National-Geographic documentary-style narratives and advertising techniques of post-production, the artworks reveal the multiple artifices used to construct images of history and reality, debunking their claims of objectivity and neutrality.

In distinct manners, each artist forces us to redefine our notions of the natural and artificial and consider the multiple agents and factors negotiating the limit between them, and invite us to relate our understandings of captivity and freedom in relation territory, power, and wealth.