European artifacts of curiosity, 15th-20th centuries

Giovanni Bernardino Azzolino
Damned Soul
1620s
miniature wax relief
Victoria & Albert Museum

These are pieces that have got isolated from any others that are like them. Each one of such orphans can sometimes speak in a voice all the more spontaneous and idiosyncratic when the chorus of context happens to be absent.

French sculptor
St. Roch
early 16th century
carved & painted oak
Metropolitan Museum

Netherlandish sculptor
Statuette of a Male Saint
c. 1610
carved boxwood
Victoria & Albert Museum

Italian engraver
Woman in Chariot pulled by Centaurs
c. 1599-1622
engraving
Metropolitan Museum

Oscar Gustave Rejlander
Ariadne
1857
albumen silver print
Metropolitan Museum

Staffordshire pottery
Reclining Lucretia
c. 1800-1830
Victoria & Albert Museum

Tina Modotti
No. 1
1925
platinum print
Getty

Achille Etna Michallon
The Tiber with the Temple of Vesta & the Ponte Rotto, Rome
early 19th century
drawing
Metropolitan Museum

Eugène Atget
Vieille Empire
1902
albumen silver print
Getty

Venetian furniture-maker
Rococo Commode
c. 1745-50
painted oak
Getty

Venetian foundry
Baroque Door Knocker with figures of Prudence & Fortitude united by Eternity
late 16th century
bronze
Metropolitan Museum

Bartolommeo Melioli
Portrait Medal of Francesco II Gonzaga
before 1484
bronze
Victoria & Albert Museum

Julia Margaret Cameron
Cupid & Psyche
1864-65
albumen silver print
Victoria & Albert Museum

Gaetano Giulio Zumbo
Damned Soul
c. 1700
miniature wax relief
Victoria & Albert Museum

Cruzvillegas

The page devoted to conceptual artist Abraham Cruzvillegas (b. 1968) at the Walker Art Center summarizes his work in these words –

"Informed by the sociopolitical contexts of Latin America, Cruzvillegas has garnered much attention for his dynamic assemblage sculptures made of found objects. Interested in improvised building materials and techniques, he roots his sculptural practice within the urban landscape of his childhood home in Ajusco, a district in the south of Mexico City." 

The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis mounted an exhibition in 2013 –

"Featuring 30 to 35 individual sculptures and installations, along with his recent experiments in video, film, and performance, Abraham Cruzvillegas: The Autoconstrucción Suites is the first major presentation to shed light on the artist’s unique vision and multifaceted practice."

Posing I

Karolina Kurkova for Vogue Mexico

Kai Newman for Vogue Germany

Bekah Jenkins for Red Magazine

Nora Shopova for Vogue Turkey

Luma Grothe for Grey Magazine

Carola Remer for L'Officiel Mexico

Claudia Schiffer for Dolce & Gabbana

Doug for Glamour Magazine

Doug for Glamour Magazine

Doug for Saint Laurent Paris

One Management in New York represents many fashion models and keeps the world informed about their professional doings. I appreciate this service because the places where the models appear are inevitably of a widely scattered nature and would be hard to track down if the agency had not already done the job.

Perra Perdida

Abyección:

Mezclar, ocasionar reacciones, efervescencias, espesamiento. Tratar con lo místico y lo perverso. ¿Acaso sigue el yo animal atado a su correa?
Burbujear.

Abjection:

Mixing, causing reactions, effervescences, thickening. Dealing in the mystical and the perverse. Is the animal self still on a leash?
To fizz.

Gabriela Jauregui wrote this meditation in Spanish and in English as part of a  longer text for Perra Perdida, a collaborative exhibition by Allison Katz and Camilla Wills at LULU, "an independent, Mexico City-based project space founded and run by the artist Martin Soto Climent and the independent curator Chris Sharp."

"The posters take as their starting point a found “chienne perdue” announcement, which Katz picked up in Quebec during the summer of 2011. Parodying the codes of information, the telephone number of the frantic owner is replaced with that of the curator. Katz and Wills take further liberties with the function of a poster: advertising the show becomes the show itself, another deferral, as a variety of information (title, names, venue, dates, city, contact information) circulates throughout the series of announcements, none of which take precedence as the official version."

"Down the hall, the action of the wall mural is a repetition and rearrangement of the posters. Redacted and abbreviated, they are a shorthand plea. Through the persistence of repetition, the trauma they announce is reclaimed as a source of pleasure; the decorative absorbs the loss. The pattern is indexical of the walk, the rhythmic call, the lack, and equally the excess of the search. Similar to propaganda textiles fabricated during WWII, an unlikely theme is promoted inside the usually safe, or neutrally, decorated interior. In a direct refutation of the flâneur or the tourist, Katz and Wills insert themselves into the context of Mexico City through a fantasy insistence that they have a pet, as only someone local could have, and by extension, are not lost or temporary, but already rooted in a sense of daily life."

Highway Follies

"Highway Follies is a project based on abandoned constructions, quasi-romantic ruins, located by the side of Mexican highways"  

Pia Camil (b. 1980) lives and works in Mexico City.