PROJECT ROOM: Jorge Méndez Blake
All the Poetry Books
September 16, 2010 – January 23, 2011
For the third Project Room exhibition of the year, MOLAA is pleased to present All the Poetry Books by Mexican artist Jorge Méndez Blake. Jorge Méndez Blake (Mexico, 1974) is a conceptual artist and co-founder of Space 16/16, an independent art space in Guadalajara, Mexico. In his work he concentrates on relationships between literature, art, and culture, with historical and geographical elements. In an interview with Jimena Acosta, in 2009, Méndez Blake stated, “I think the idea of the library as the sacred storage of written culture has to evolve into an open democratic state, in which people interact and transform the way we organize and have access to culture and knowledge. We can no longer sustain the idea of culture as just one unique volume. The idea of the library as a sole institution has to move towards an ever-changing, constantly reshaped form. Just as literature cannot be seen as a homogeneous discipline, I think the “building” that contains it should be approached in a similar way.”
For this project, the artist will do a “poetry mapping” of the area, removing the complete section of poetry holdings from various Los Angeles and Long Beach libraries and crating them to their specific, accumulated volume in relationship to each library. The exhibition will include a new crate installation on the third Thursday of every month for the duration of the project (presented during En la Noche). The dates of the book removals will be announced in the upcoming months.
All the Poetry Books will serve as an interactive platform introducing Los Angeles and the surrounding community to the artist’s conceptual work. The proposed actions that the artist has with the public libraries and the placement of the crated books in the gallery space will include the public’s participation and discussion about cultural frameworks or containers of culture such as a library or a museum.
This project is a part of VIA, a multi-site, multi-artist exhibition organized by Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND). LAND is a non-profit public art initiative committed to curating site- and situation-specific contemporary art projects, in Los Angeles and beyond. For more information, please visit: www.nomadicdivision.org
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