TWO EXHIBITIONS AT JUMEX THAT REFLECT ON HEAT AS A TRANSITIONAL AXIS

Temperatura ambiente is a reading of works by international artists whose works convey relationships with the environment. Curated by Mexican artist, Sofía Táboas, the exhibition articulates three spaces: inside, outside and between, mediated by often extreme changes of temperatures or other natural phenomena.

Relationships between human activities and the world at large have become increasingly present in our lives at all scales, from the effects of global warming to the current pandemic. What was once seen as a division between nature and culture, is now understood as interactions where each act impacts the ecology and in turn our means of survival. These present complex dilemmas of how we find shelter while also caring for the environment, when our day-to-day lives have repercussions beyond our direct experience, and what to preserve and what to change. Many of the works might be considered threshold moments frozen in time, or the act of transit from one state to another. By focusing on such apparent contradictions, the exhibition expresses how contemporary art is uniquely able to convey the complexities of our relationships to our many environments, and how the artist as curator can provide new insight into the works of others.

With works by Francis Alÿs, Tacita Dean, Mark Dion, Olafur Eliasson, Gabriel Kuri, Alicja Kwade, Ann Veronica Janssens and Salla Tykkä among others, the exhibition analyzes the ways in which heat travels through the body affecting experiences and emotions, with global climate change as a backdrop.

Sofía Táboas: Gama térmica focuses on similar reflections. Sofía Táboas investigates both natural and man-made space, as well as how it is built and transformed, thought about, and perceived. These ideas are explored in her sculptures and installations, which utilize materials such as artificial and live plants, mosaics, pool equipment, construction materials, plastic, light bulbs, and fire. Her works create thresholds and boundaries between elements that may be incongruent or seemingly irreconcilable, serving to reinvent the borders of the public and the private, the inside and the outside.

In this exhibition, a focus on temperature weaves together the works from different periods and shifts attention to sensations beyond the visual alone at the heart of the artist’s aesthetics. Expressed in her titles, the mutable materials, and interactions of light, heat, and air present both in and between the individual works, temperature mediates directly between seemingly distinct places, states of being and experiences. Her works are a constant investigation into the implications of defining and delimiting spaces, living things and objects, focusing instead on thresholds where binary classifications no longer apply. At a time when human effects on the environment are felt on a daily basis, her perspective is especially pertinent today through works that push at the brink of what falls in or out of our lives.