Jaime Cortez: Self Evident
and
Truong Tran: Framed Target
Desai | Matta Gallery
Jaime Cortez and Truong Tran
The Arts at CIIS is proud to launch our new street level gallery with two one-person exhibitions: Jaime Cortez: Self Evident, and Truong Tran: Framed Targets. Each artist addresses the ways technology and the transformation of the physical, economic, and social space
of the city play into individual and community identity. In the age of immediacy and
disposability—whether the snapshot or the throwaway material good—these artists are
reclaiming what’s been quickly discarded, rendering it beautiful through their obsessive attention, making visible what’s becom(ing) invisible, and locating our collective desire for the expression of the self.
Jaime Cortez’ Self Evident celebrates the classically beautiful and eminently imperfect, the empowered and the abject, found in the uniquely contemporary form of self-portraiture, the selfie. Scouring men’s online sex ads—expressions of self, desire, and possibility—that both reveal and conceal, Cortez has transformed the throwaway images into acutely
rendered photorealistic drawings. Aware of his position as voyeur, Cortez pairs these drawings with his own self-portraits, both photographic and sculptural; like the subjects of his drawings, his own body is rendered alien, vulnerable, and fallibly heroic.
With Framed Targets, Truong Tran investigates his own experience of San Francisco in our collective moment. As a gay man of color he is situated in a complex and contradictory position of feeling both invisible in the face of a growing demographic of mostly younger, mostly white and straight techies, and a target of the same economic forces driving this social transformation. Inserting himself in the stream of discarded materials, Tran has gathered and transformed throwaways into a series of sculptural targets. They remind the viewer of minimalist paintings while dashing easy comparison. Disrupted and suffused with contemporary technologies and personal references, they aim to queer the consciousness of contemporary art.
[Images sourced from artbusines.com]