“Infecundas” video to be featured in O Cinema‘s Monitoring Art exhibit

O Cinema, in conjunction with the Calix Gustav Gallery, present their inaugural exhibition of video art titled, Monitoring Art, on Saturday, December 5th with a reception open to the public and held in celebration of Art Basel and the Wynwood Art Walk.

“Infecundas”

Video by Xavier Cortada

Music by Juan Carlos Espinosa

Digital video

3m 11s

2007

MONITORING ART

Monitoring Art showcases the talent of burgeoning and established artists working in video and the moving image.

Featuring the works of ten artists, including Clifton Childree, Xavier Cortada, Dinorah de Jesus Rodriguez, JC Espinosa, Christina Petterssen, Alette Simmons-Jimenez, Nikki Rollason, Russell Chartier, and Paul J. Botelho the exhibition will also showcase the now classic piece, I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much, by renown international artist Pipilotti Rist. I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much is a lush work in which pop culture’s repetitive strategies and the representations of women in the music video genre are elevated to absurdity.

Monitoring Art will open simultaneous to a group exhibition at the Calix Gustav Gallery titled, “Grit: to endure a trying situation and continue on without complaint,” which will feature works by Yanelis Lopez, Jonathan Stein, and Spunk and the Orange Kittens and was curated by Gallery Director Amanda Fernandez-Leon.

“Monitoring Art” and “Grit: to endure a trying situation and continue on without complaint” will run from December 1st, 2009 through February 2nd, 2010 at the Calix Gustav Gallery 98 NW 29th Street. Monitoring Art opens Saturday, December 5th from 6pm to 9pm. Visiting hours are from Tuesday to Friday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturdays from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m.

This exhibition is made possible by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Miami-Dade Department of Cultural Affairs.

“Infecundas:”

VIDEO:            The title of the video is “Infecundas,” which means “infertile” in Spanish.  Miami artist Xavier Cortada documented three employees at work in a refrigerated room of the USDA Medfly Sterilization Facility in Sarasota, Florida.  (Each day they vacuum millions of flies hatched from eggs sterilized by gamma radiation in Central America from their breeding boxes into specialized containers.  The irradiated flies are later released into the wild from crop dusting planes. The release of the sterilized males makes it virtually impossible for a fertile wild female Medfly in the area to find and mate with a fertile wild male. The mating between a sterile male and a wild female produces no progeny – no flies. Science is helping us eradicate this invasive foreign species without the use of pesticides. However, the battle against the Medfly will not end any time soon because humans continue to smuggle infested fruit into Florida every day.)

STATEMENT:

Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. (Genesis 1:28)

For thousands of years humans have been reshaping wildlife into things that are more useful to us. The reshaping made sense, it was practical, it became necessary, it was the only way to feed more and more humans who lived longer because those things that had been wild and had become ours to use for own benefit, made people healthier, live longer and multiply more fruitfully.

However, just about every animal domesticated and every plant cultivated brought with it its own set of negative consequences – to human health in the form of diet-related chronic illnesses, as vectors of diseases, environmental damage, the inequality of mono-culture economies, the use of food as a weapon of war, the dependence of humans on agro-industrial complexes, the tenuous relationship we have all developed toward what we consume, the fetishism of guilt-ridden environmentalism, the commodification of everything, etc. And so here we are.

In Florida, we have reshaped our state in terrible and often very useful ways. We have transformed much of our wilderness into manicured agricultural groves of genetically-engineered super citrus bred to be, among other things, seedless. Miles and miles of rolling hills in Central Florida are covered with fruit trees; the orderly rows are a pleasure to see, the smell of orange blossoms is sublime.  They are the “new wilderness,” a forest where all the trees are of the same species and height and planted at the same distance from one another.

However, even these perfect fruit domesticated thousands of years ago from less attractive specimens from Southeast Asia, have enemies: the Mediterranean fruit fly is one of them.