In May of 2007, the haudenschildGarage collaborated with artist Lisa Tan. While in Buenos Aires she made a collection of grave rubbings from the Cementerio de La Recoleta and sent the Garage daily images and thoughts on her experience of the city.

*On September 5, 2007 Lisa Tan presented her project Recoleta at the haudenschildGarage and was in conversation with former San Diego Museum of Art director Derrick Cartwright and LAXART director Lauri Firstenberg.

*In January of 2010 Lisa Tan revisited her project Recoleta and reflected on how three years changed her perspective on the project and the collection of drawings born out of the experience. See ‘Related Content’ below for a link to her text.

Provisionally titled Recoleta, this project began during my first trip to Argentina in August of 2006. The Recoleta cemetery is located in a well-heeled neighborhood in Buenos Aires that bears the same name. Initially, this site piqued my interest when I learned that it is configured like a city. It is in fact a city of a couple hundred mausoleums—a distinctive and elite necropolis.

The graves vary in style, density, and material. Some are ornate over-built structures that could house a small café, and others are minimal blocks of smooth granite. They all exist side by side along paths that branch off from main “boulevards,” mimicking the cosmopolitan surroundings just beyond the cemetery walls.

To take this potent site into account, I decided to make grave rubbings of select mausoleums, while avoiding all literal and figurative aspects—including areas of text, image, or overly descriptive textures. Marble statuary, glass doors, bronze plaques, and crosses, all dissolve into a collection of black monochromes. En masse, they vary little from one rubbing to the next; they become voids that reflect of a repository of unknowable histories.

Over the course of my stay in Buenos Aires, I will be posting a selection of images of my daily experience in the city. (Viva Argentina!) — Lisa Tan

About Lisa Tan

Lisa Tan (www.lisatan.net) is an artist based in Brooklyn and Stockholm. Her work draws from personal and collective history, particularly in the realms of literature and cinema to deal with longing and loss as constant conditions of being. Many of Tan’s works involve an interest in the conditions of nighttime and solitude as experienced in the context of iconic urbanism. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo CGAC (Santiago de Compostela), Kadist Art Foundation (Paris), El Centro Cultural Montehermoso (Vitoria-Gasteiz), Andreas Grimm (Munich), FDC Satellite (Brussels), Artists Space (New York), Galerie Kamm (Berlin), D’Amelio Terras (New York), Harris Lieberman (New York), and LAXART (Los Angeles). She was the 2009 artist-in-residence at FRAC Bourgogne, (Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain – Région Bourgogne). Her work has been featured and reviewed in publications such as Artforum, artforum.com, Glänta, Blind Spot, FlashArt, and Art Papers. Lisa Tan received her B.A. from the University of Texas at El Paso and her M.F.A. from the University of Southern California (USC).

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14