Texto sin fin
Mayra Silva
05 Marzo de 2010 - 09 Mayo de 2010
Espacio de exhibición: Galería
Curaduría: Taiyana Pimentel
In Endless Book, Monterrey artist Mayra Silva (Nuevo León, 1978, lives and works in Monterrey) presents 11 works produced between 2003 and 2010. In this show consisting of videos, sound recordings and installations, Silva focuses the discourse on the role of the text as a reflection of a recent memory deposited on objects that have lost their productive capacity in a society in which the value of mercantile use ends up defining existence. The artist turns the unproductive into the productive in such a way that useless bank checks or stationery (invitations and airline envelopes) are recycled as memory containers.
Since her earliest work, Silva has given a conceptual importance to the use of text as a creative resource that tends to follow two main routes: they are either texts appropriated from various literary sources or from writing derived from personal experience. In either case, the device of the text serves as a brand or record of the space and time inhabited by the artist, in which the reconstruction of a possible linear memory is located at the center of the proposal. Her early texts appear in the form of graffiti or on photographic images taken by the artist.
Subsequently, the text begins to productively redefine objects forgotten by contemporary consumer society. Thus, the memories described by Silva appear in a used checkbook or else she uses envelopes from Continental Airlines or other companies that often send headed notepaper as a support. In any case, the point is to shape a critical profession on the basis of the text, where the immediacy of the text and the recycled object reflect present and immediate time. That is why trips and movements are explicitly recorded in her memories; hence the insistence on objects that serve as witnesses to the artist’s visits to various cities. These reflect the global artist’s experience, which in turn is marked by rapid changes of location.