May 12 - July 28, 2007

Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston is pleased to announce Miguel Angel Ríos: Aquí, an exhibition featuring two new groundbreaking video installations, On the Edge (2005) and Aquí (2006), accompanied by twenty drawings, sixteen monumentally scaled black-and-white photographs, and a newly completed documentary film providing a look at Ríos' creative process in the making of these landmark artworks. Drawing inspiration from street games, Ríos explores themes of poetry and politics via abstract narratives concerning human relations, love, and war. This is Ríos' first major solo exhibition in an American museum.

The culmination of a series of single and multi-channel video works, Aquí is presented in a pentagonal theater÷physically a room within a room, as well as an allusion to the nation's halls of power. In this installation, Ríos effectively creates a formal environment in which the viewer becomes the work's central element, enveloped in Ríos' larger than life projections, the penetrating sound of spinning tops, and the artist's actual voiceover, shouting ãAquíä as he instructs his players.

Born in Catamarca, Argentina in 1943, Miguel Angel Ríos now divides his time between Mexico City and New York. Located in the far north of Argentina, Catamarca is distant both geographically and culturally from the urban, Eurocentric atmosphere of Buenos Aries÷a dichotomy reflected in his approach to art-making. Following works of the past two decades which involved map-based constructions exploring colonialism and globalization, the artist began experimenting with sculptural installations using sound and video in the early 2000s; in 2003, Ríos created a work of audacious brilliance, the three-channel video entitled A Morir (Îtil Death) . This darkly romantic narrative of spinning black and white tops - trompos - signaled a dramatic turning point in the artist's career. These moving images propel the viewer into uncharted territory with dynamic scenes of dueling tops÷a technique that has provided him with a rich new artistic direction allowing him to articulate his primary concerns of cultural translations, geopolitics, and human interaction on a broad symbolic and mythical level.

In the accompanying catalog, art critic Raphael Rubinstein describes the aesthetic in Ríos' work as being couched in such diverse influences as the ãcontrolled ambienceä of Mondrian's canvases, Fritz Lang's depiction of power struggles on artificially constructed sets in Metropolis , and Picasso's colorless palette in Guernica , but within an intensely brutal context reminiscent of more concrete violent spectacles in society such as bullfights, boxing matches, soccer and football games, and war movies and westerns. Rubinstein suggests that the interactions between the tops may indeed represent the tactics of conventional armies against guerrilla forces, and ultimately, serve as an allegory of empire. Nevertheless, despite the political clash evident in the installation, the viewer cannot help but revel in the inherent playfulness of Ríos' mesmerizing tops as they spin across the screen.

Accompanying the title work is Fuego Amigo , a documentary in which Ríos shares the journey involved in the making of his work, from recruiting 30 trompos players on the streets of Tepoztlán to leading a team of donkeys into the dense forest in search of fine wood from which to construct his own props. This documentary provides a behind the scenes look into the mind of one of Latin America's most compelling modern-day creative players.

The exhibition explores Ríos' work through three central themes. First, the idea of games as metaphor÷an inspiration to Ríos because 'games have rules and the making, remaking, and breaking of rules are natural metaphors for the power games that take place between Latin America and the official rule makers of the world.' The role of time, movement, and space in altering perception serve as a second theme. Using disturbing and indeterminate soundtracks and multiple channels and screens, Ríos alters viewers' physical and visual relationships to the architecture of the gallery spaces. Lastly, the dual nature of human relations is manifest in Ríos' symbolic narratives through the interplay of black and white, positive and negative, control and chance. The convergence of these three conceptsin this ambitious endeavor once again thrusts Miguel Angel Ríos into the forefront of the global contemporary art arena.

Miguel Angel Ríos: Aquí is organized by Terrie Sultan, Director, Blaffer Gallery, and will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with essays by Terrie Sultan, Raphael Rubinstein, and Amy Rosenblum Martín. The exhibition has been made possible in part by Houston Endowment Inc., Occidental Energy Marketing, Inc., Ellen and Steve Susman: The Susman Family Foundation, Sallie Morian and Michael Clark, Union Pacific Foundation, and The Cecil Amelia Blaffer von Furstenburg Endowment for Exhibitions and Programs.

Related Programs:
Wednesday, May 23, 12 pm - Brown Bag Gallery Tour
Wednesday, June 20, 6pm - Contemporary Salon

Blaffer Gallery exhibitions and programs are supported by the Blaffer Gallery Director's Discretionary Endowment Fund, the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, The George and Mary Josephine Hamman Foundation, KUHF 88.7 FM, and Texas Commission on the Arts. Educational outreach programs are made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, with matching funds provided by Jane Blaffer Owen and Dr. and Mrs. Vernon Knight.

Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston, is located in the Fine Arts Building on the University of Houston's main campus, entrance #16 off Cullen Boulevard. The museum is free and open to the public Tuesday through Saturday from 10am to 5pm and closed Sundays, Mondays and University Holidays. The museum is ADA compliant. For more information please call 713.743.9530.