Anna Betbeze
UC Riverside Faculty Member Anna Betbeze has a two-person show with Corazón del Sol now open at The Box Gallery.
Anna Betbeze & Corazón del Sol
Sarcophagus Telephone
The Box
February 5 – March 26, 2022
All Day Opening February 5, 12-6pm
Artist Walk Through February 19, 11am
Sarcophagus Telephone is a collection of works by Anna Betbeze and Corazón del Sol. Coming from its Greek roots Sarcophagus means flesh-eating and Telephone means sound from afar. This title gives navigational reference to the viewer on how these artists prioritize the importance of losing control, their devotion to questions of material transformation, formlessness, and diffraction, centering all that is sensory. This project is about speaking in and outside of time, dreams made corporeal, and the breadth of friendship. Betbeze and Del Sol pursue pre-linguistic forms of expression, embodied practices, and ritual in their respective practices; engaging the polychromatic, crystallized nature of color, color as light and sensation.
When Betbeze and del Sol met a few years ago, they discovered uncanny parallels in their formal languages. They share lodestones such as Catherine Malabou’s formulations of plasticity and Audre Lorde’s conception of The Erotic. Del Sol uses caustic synthetic materials such as Dragon Skin silicone, resins and enamels, much of which is used in the film industry for artifice and illusion. With Veils, large silicone skins rubbed with vibrant color overlap and filter light creating an enveloping space for the viewer to enter. Her work, Instrument for Becoming, is a experiential sound object that places the body in vulnerable relation to sonic vibration.
Betbeze has continually worked with the haptic sense through densely layered and textured materials, insisting on finding the limits of her materials through fire, acids, and saturation. Large paintings on wool flokati evoke carcasses, animated by color, texture, and emotional projection. In a new work Studies for Death Puppet, a collection of video vignettes feature motorized puppets made of tin foil and duct tape. A larger projection and sculpture, Endings, Beginnings, made in collaboration with artist and musician, Caye Castagnetto, expands on these ideas; tracking consciousness in materiality, human loss in the face of AI, and the perception of liveness in kinetic movement.
The Trojan Horses (Medusa and Cave) are a pair of collaborative sculptures that were conceived as two sided stages, a rotating platform where material fragments combine in non-fixed, improvised, and alchemical compositions. Each work reveals the dominant aesthetic of each artist, exploring the margins of collaborative art making and exploratory sense making of how two beings come together to make collaborative works.
Existing within a world that is increasingly circumscribed by the optics of digital technology, and its concomitant limitations and expansions of the perceivable world, Betbeze and Del Sol make work for the sensing body, with a belief that only through erotic thought and attention to feeling, can we truly address the urgencies of this particular moment.
Anna Betbeze’s work involves exploration of the touch sense and proprioceptive sensation, arriving at new forms that combine elements of painting, sculpture, puppetry, performance, and pedagogy. Her work has been shown at institutions such as MOMA PS1, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, The Hessel Museum at Bard College, MassMOCA and The Power Station, Shanghai. Her recent and ongoing project Touch Workshop is oriented around questions: How can the tactile imagination respond in the absence of tactile freedom? How do we transfer feeling, touching those outside of our time-space? This project was presented at Human Resources LA in 2020 and featured in TDR Journal in 2021.
Corazon del Sol is a third generation Los Angeles-based artist. Informally taught by her early access to the arts and subsequent questioning of the arts’ organizing systems, she has a practice rooted in collective sense making through conversation, movement, video, sculpture, and other experimental modes. Her work has been shown at international institutions such as Salon Nacional 44 Colombia (Colombian National Salon of Artists) and International Centre for Contemporary Culture, San Sebastian. Del Sol has curated shows including Dysfuctional Formulas of Love with co-curator Víctor Albarracín Llanos and Let Power Take a Female Form. Through her community activism and formation of the low-cost housing prototype, Jardin de Estrellas, she brings form to her belief that beautiful housing is a fundamental human right. The prototype of the Jardin de Estrella is installed in The Box parking lot for viewers to see. Lately she is most interested in connectivity’s ability to dislodge addiction to power that traumas engender.
