A SOLO EXHIBITION BY LISA IGLESIAS THEY SHOOT HORSES DON’T THEY? curated by Erin Sickler

OPENING RECEPTION 10 / 16 /2010 FROM 6 – 9 PM

EXHIBITION ON VIEW UNTIL 11 / 14 /2010

Eyelevel BQE is pleased to present Queens native Lisa Iglesias’s first solo exhibition in New York. Mining sources ranging from the Ashley Book of Knots to Victorian Mourning Hair Wreaths, from Norwegian folk tales to Dominican iconography, Iglesias’s work weaves together seemingly disparate imagery to create new associations. Through a practice that includes investigation, ritual and repetition, wall drawings, stop-motion animations and paper constructions, Iglesias creates visual incantations, calling out to a broader reading of history. In her new work, she explores ideas of “Americanness”.

While her practice is rooted in drawing, Iglesias employs a wide array of strategies, including video and sculpture, to explore issues of repetition, fate and the uncanny. Meticulous mark making, repetitive construction techniques, and interplay between individual and collaborative work incite the viewer to question modes of temporality, authorship and futility. Iglesias’s stop-motion animation La Sonnambula, 2010 (sound by Christopher Ryan Spence) distills frames from the 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Through hundreds of drawings, she renders a new film, measuring the desperation of the young and jobless who participated in the exploitative dance derbies of the Great Depression. Similarly, a flip-book and associated drawings depict the movements of rodeo horses, demonstrating the terrifying ease with which one individual’s misery can become another’s delight. Always and Forever, 2010 a giant cardboard necklace and a pile of cast-paper AK 47s give form to the one-upmanship of contemporary politics.

In the curator’s words: “Re-inserting visceral truths back into the historical timeline, Iglesias allows a contemplative labor to permeate her difficult task. Why rush? Life is short – we do not know how soon it will end – and long – the future is unceasing, glorious and insufferable. Understanding this fundamental incongruity, Iglesias does not waste time advertising herself with trendy imagery or clever gimmicks. Instead, she applies herself diligently, confronting the Horror Vacui in every day. Blazing trails through emptiness and marking paths through forgetting, she maps indelible constellations in drawings, films, situations and objects.”