The moment that one steps into the gallery, the journey begins. But it is not like any other journey, and it is not what you could possibly imagine.
The exhibition Herramientas (Levels and Bosses), which in Spanish means tools, takes place at the Locust Projects art gallery in the heart of the Design District in Miami, a few months before the advent of the super art event of Miami Basel. I kind of understand why. It’s actually better that it comes like a prelude to an avalanche of many different art events all put together, so that one can quietly and deeply savor the experience.
Leo Castaneda, a Colombian artist who lives in Miami and New York, has turned the gallery space into a site of exploration. He explains that he tries to construct a virtual world with the use of video games and interdependent interaction within the gaming communities. Yes, we can see that from the large projections of video game-like imagery moving into landscapes of digital fantasy, and we also see actual screens placed on tables where one can sit and watch.
But, I suspect, there is much more to that. The walls are full of paintings, collages, and traditional hand-made drawings, and even garments of designs that point to the same fantastic journey: one nondescript individual going into a multi-dimensional rabbit hole, but we do not know where he is going. When he jumps down to rough depths, we do not feel him crash, or his pain, just like when we are dreaming.
What is left to feel is a myriad of different approaches towards a certain discovery, we would perhaps never find the intended discovery and yet we are given an opportunity to feel the aesthetics of the adventure from every possible angle.
There are painted and printed garments, prototypes, models, sculptures, canvas paintings, animation, virtual images showing landscapes reminiscent of the 18th century Romantic paintings, vast futuristic digital dumpsters next to nostalgic sparkles of water that reflects the simplicity of nature, offering liminal moments transitioning from one parallel universe to the other, and despite all the gaming paraphernalia, reigns in the midst of the Herramientas world an eerie, hopeful and quite wonderful existential longing for perception.
As I sat on a soft sand filled chair to watch the videos on a different wall, I felt that the artist had used every “herramienta” or tool of art to show his point, and the word “process” kept on popping up to my mind. A process in the fantasy of a journey, a never-ending journey that had just begun.
