Refugio, 2008
Exhibición personal
Galería Lucía de la Puente, Lima
This exhibition is in contrast to his last solo show at the ICPNA in Miraflores, where he mainly presented his work in sculpture. This time Randall tries to show the artistic process of drawing in space as a workshop. These are loose ideas that are not very specific as the basis from which his discourse on the sculptural part starts. The materials used in his work usually come from the remains of society and the artist himself, as is the case of the architectural drawing table intervened with sheets of telephone directories that form a huaca-type topography or constellation of stars. Randall explains that he tries to infuse and confuse everyday structures to create allegorical spaces that serve to question the contradictions exposed by the language of representation and to point out the intangible sense of anxiety that the artist feels for what is produced through science; specifically the problematic combination of utility and aesthetics in relation to our environment and ourselves.
Ishmael Randall Weeks inaugurates a tension between the reflection on the depletion of the world as a unique resource and an allegory on what is left of the future at the hands of instrumental development. On the margins of his landscape and his plot, the silhouettes of a longing appear and also those of the memory of a childhood in the Andes (yes, the same Andean countryside that cannot be seen through the opaque prism of the logic of late capitalism) : an old memory of the future, in the post and pre-industrial contour, in irony as an ancillary virtue of recycling and, to that extent, a certain posthumous thing too, like that almost artificial grass that grows in the cracks of certain pieces of his, or in the deliberate resemblance between the unproductive factory and the abandonment of poverty itself, in its future backwardness and precariousness. Perhaps, the scene is in essence primordial, in the sense that it summarizes a series of intuitions and reflections of the artist. But also in the sense that it is the product of a certain shock or encounter, through which the artist has been decanting his own avatar in the continuity of his work.
In various ways, IRW's work always alludes to the origins, or if you prefer, to the origins that begin to disappear behind a certain course towards which the planet is heading and which is not always the best - and of the tangles of a certain contemporary complexity. That contemporaneity that the artist does not see as something always kind to the past (or at least not to all the pasts, or to all versions of history), nor perhaps to any plausible future.
Rodrigo Quijano