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THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

ERICK MEYENBERG

Music and sound design by RODERIC

ARTE ABIERTO presents Things We Do for Love by Erick Meyenberg, a show specially commissioned for Espacio Arte Abierto.

• The exhibition is made up of a multi-channel audiovisual project with five screens and ten-channel surround sound, and a sculpture that represents his first ceramic work for the artist.

• The project results in an ode to life that emerged from an introspective journey in which the artist manages to document the beauty of everyday life.

• Things We Do for Love will be open to the public beginning Friday, June 24, 2022.

Arte Abierto presents its fourth exhibition with a multichannel video installation with five screens and a large-format ceramic sculpture, specially commissioned from the artist Erick Meyenberg (Mexico City, 1980) for Espacio Arte Abierto.

Things We Do for Love results in an ode to life in which different fragments of what makes up and gives context to existence are interconnected: the universe, space, time, force and affections seen from nature, cities, people… The idea for the video installation arose after Meyenberg returned from an artist residency in Japan* during which he began to understand his gaze through the lens of his camera as the only tool available to heal a personal story: “When everything has been broken, how to move in a world that is so foreign? How to rebuild it? How to glue the pieces that have remained? Thus, what began as a journey to a geography and culture totally alien to his own, became an introspection to find the beauty of life.

In his month-long stay in Tokyo, Kyoto, Kanazawa, Hiroshima, and Naoshima, Meyenberg captured moments of life seemingly unrelated to each other. In the process, while looking through what the camera framed him, he says that a phrase resonated in his mind “Things we do for love”. Back in Mexico, the visual fragments from Japan were joined by others taken in Los Cabos, Valle de Bravo, Acapulco and Ixtapa, as well as the sequence of some cicadas in their process of metamorphosis, taken from the Internet, which completed the visual archive that now compose the sample video.

For Meyenberg, the great accumulation of images that documented hundreds of moments, situations or places, represented a broken and disjointed world. Thus, uniting them through editing meant transforming the vision of the torn into a promise of life. Based on Kintsugi, a Japanese philosophy that repairs broken objects and sticks their fragments with gold dust, the artist found the perfect metaphor to convene his image archive and form the video installation created by the editor and filmmaker Martha Uc.

The music for the video had to contain the affective force of what was experienced and provide an emotional and abstract support where the collection of filmed moments could be interwoven. Thus, by intuition, the artist decided not to accompany the images with his real sound, but to experiment with the emotional and suggestive abstraction that electronic music allows, in collaboration with the musician Roderic.

For its part, the large-format ceramic sculpture presents a dismembered flower. Due to the dimensions of the work as a whole and the delicacy with which ceramics* must be modelled, glazed and baked so as not to compromise the material, it was produced in parts until it formed a sculptural object whose forms refer to a series of elements to which that Meyenberg came from an imaginative insight while shooting in both Japan and Mexico. After filming a chrysanthemum on the ground of a cemetery in Tokyo, after a typhoon, the idea arose of a sculpture that would recover the force and movement of the water and the sea that appear in much of the video, and whose colors would reflect the love and eroticism: “the sculpture had to emerge from the ground, just as Aphrodite emerged from the waters”, the artist mentions. Both the petals and the space between them, which becomes the Kintsugi or gold dust that holds them together, are part of the sculptural intervention.

Beyond a specific and determined interpretation, Things We Do for Love proposes an introspective and emotional reflection on the transition that occurs between mourning and hope as experiences that are the product of love.

The video of the exhibition was made in collaboration with the video editor Martha Uc, Roderic in musical composition and sound design, Santiago Rodríguez Rebolledo in sound supervision, cellist Natalia Pérez-Turner and guest performers: Louise Phelan and Francisco López -War.

*Casa NaNo artist residency in Tokyo, Japan, sponsored by Fundación Casa Wabi.
* The sculpture was made in the Cerámica Suro workshop in Guadalajara, Mexico.