Trends of Life Juried Awards Exhibition. Charting the Currents of Contemporary Existence
by Milagros Bello, PhD
The Trends of Life/ Juried Awards Exhibition juried by Claudia Zaion and Milagros Bello, delves into the complexities of contemporary life, examining how current dynamics—social, technological, emotional, and cultural—shape and continuously reshape the human experience. The show draws a compelling portrait of life today, capturing the rhythms, ruptures, and reinventions that define our times. It maps a sensory landscape of our fluid realities, where the ephemeral, the viral, the vulnerable, and the adaptive are interwoven in constant mutation. It interrogates the complexities of the human condition through art.
The works confront urgent themes such as the influence of artificial intelligence, cycles of anxiety and wellness, and personal mythologies; all of them crystallizing society nowadays. Each piece operates as a lens through which to interpret the affective and critical dimensions of contemporary life, inviting the viewers to an interface between personal experience and collective consciousness.
This juried awards exhibition continues the curatorial line of MIA Curatorial Projects, focusing on tensions and transformations in contemporary art.
Jurors’ selected Artists:
Eliana Barbosa, Elba Bello, Eumelia Castro, Francisco Cerón, Sergio Cesario, Meg Cogburn, Mabel Hernández, Karina Matheus, Clark Medley, Raquel Munera, Beatriz Sánchez, Mircza Seiler, Alexis Rivero.
AWARDED ARTISTS
Clark Medley’s Unspeakable (FIRST PRIZE AWARD), presents six vibrant translucent cylinders suspended in the air as a moving performative installation, recalling totemic forms of industrial allure. Inside them, there are rolled canvases displaying graffiti-like inscriptions with colorful typographies revealing imaginary alphabets. Defying legibility and deferral of “written thoughts” from the “unspeakable “secrets of the artist, the works cast out fragments of encoded signs that interplay as concealment and revelation. They emanate from the artist’s introspection of his daily life personal thoughts. Black straps holding them aloft emphasize a tension between levitation and gravity in an ever-changing perpetual movement.
Sergio Cesario’s Transhuman Tronies Series (The Prophet of the New World Order and Doctrine Laissez-Faire) (SECOND PRIZE AWARD), a digitally composed set of dual images printed on acrylic, critically interrogates the ontological thresholds between post-human condition and machinic agency. In the intensification of algorithmic governance and the erosion of stable distinctions between organic life and computational systems, the characters pose as archetypes of societal new paradigms. His post-photographic aesthetic merges chromatic saturation, textural fragmentation, and deliberate distortion, negotiating identity, embodiment, and the regimes of technological mediation that increasingly define contemporary existence.
Eliana Barbosa’s The Irrational Course of History Today Series (THIRD PRIZE AWARD) announces critical epiphanies of the political collective subconscious grasped by the artist. The digital images printed on acrylic, inhabit chromatic matter, loose gestural marks, and imaginary de-figurations of visceral language. They are composed of brushstrokes delineations she makes over a liquid surface of a can of paint, which the artist photographs before the fleeting image dissolves on the liquid. Barbosa’s disfigured spectral visages work as political and existential apparitions reflecting power and crisis.
Rafael Montilla’s Queen Nandi, Will To Become Series (HONORABLE MENTION) Thepainting that lays out on a cut asymmetrical wood, incisively explores irregular geometry as a conceptual stance. Indebted to Concrete Art and Constructivism art, the piece subverts their historical austerity introducing sensorial dimensions of a vibrant, luminous yellow polygonal thick support and a fractured black irregular shape at the center. That deliberately acts as destabilization of balance and containment, interlocking in an extreme visual intentional asynchrony. Its sharp, angular planes, perform as resistance, and friction between order and dislocation. The abstract painting announces on the power of the Queen Nandi as a powerful Zulu Queen.
Eumelia Castro’s Genealogy (HONORABLE MENTION) is a textile workthat emerges as a tactile visual palimpsest, interweaving familial imagery, domestic materials, and symbolic narratives. Through her use of frayed gauze, lace, and linen—materials evoking ephemerality and vulnerability—Castro situates personal memory within a framework of aesthetic collection; a personal mythology of transferred photographic portraits, delicately overlaid with embroidery, beading, and appliqué, recovering erased lineages, where the past unfolds in rhizomatic patterns (Deleuze and Guattari). The work is as a system of affective and micropolitical connections in the construction of identity, through the laborious craft understood as a critical practice.
Meg Cogburn’s Eightfold Fence (HONORABLE MENTION) a painting that unfolds a vibrant eight-sided mandala where geometry, media imagery, and gestural calligraphy are displayed as fragmented narratives exploring women’s lives. Its spiraling structure gathers scenes evoking Japanese domestic culture, bridging the personal with broader cultural symbolism. A golden calligraphic phrase in circular form, quoting the first poem from Kojiki (712 AD), weaves through the composition as a conceptual thread, underscoring how collective memory and myth shape perceptions of marriage and gender roles. Rich colors and layered imagery invite an open, non-linear reading, in an interplay of precise geometry and expressive script where personal histories and collective imaginaries intertwine.
Beatriz Sanchez’s Memento Series (HONORABLE MENTION) offers an inquiry into the entanglements of memory, materiality, and affect within a contemporary assemblage practice. Repurposed objects- vintage tins, mechanical components, feathers, chains, – are assembled as sculptural pieces, evoking reliquaries or totems that function as cultural archives and as vehicles of memory and evocation. Through the reanimation of the discarded, these pieces operate as witnesses to personal and anthropological stories, sedimented as material culture in a collective memory. The works expose a taxonomy of value of what is preserved or forgotten, resonating with the lieux de mémoire (Pierre Nora) where the past is continually reactivated and contested.
Karina Matheus’ Art is Alive Series on paper (SPECIAL MENTION AWARD) propose gesture and color as an ontological space interrogating the phenomenology of perception and the material conditions of painting. Gestures display as a threshold of order and chaos of controlled/spontaneous energetic marks emerging from meditational states in listening to alpha waves music. Colors of chromatic saturation and sensual tactility expose the sensorial allure of the work, revealing the intensity of artist’s engagement to the inner creative process. The works involve intensive visual latencies and suspensions of material and immaterial dimensions.
Mircza Seiler’s All in Orange and Imprint Series on paper (SPECIAL MENTION AWARD) fuse gestural abstraction with the materiality of collage, layering cut-out paper fragments across the surface as traces of life and time. Chromatic repetitive dots, calligraphic marks and imprints generate an interconnected visual field charged with tension and fluidity. The collages dissolve the boundaries between gesture, sign, and material elements, establishing a dynamic space where transparencies and overlays disrupt any fixed hierarchy of figure and ground. Rather than articulating a univocal narrative, Seiler constructs a liquid cartography in which the visible operates as a threshold for what remains latent. This performative dimension invites viewers to inhabit a territory where time, memory, and gesture fold and unfold in continuous movement. The works are a site of inquiry, an open laboratory that reimagines existential experiences.
Raquel Munera’s collages (SPECIAL MENTION AWARD) unfold a critical exploration of social memory and subjectivity. Through the assemblage of cut-out visual fragments, photos, organic elements, textured hand-made paper, superimposed on chromatic contrasts from introspective blues to vibrant green and yellow, the works articulate a visual syntax of collective memories in a visual stratigraphy. The recurrence of children’s figures in enigmatic distress subtly evokes the inherent precariousness of their life. The insistent presence of water and fish symbols allude to the fluid and perpetual rhythm of phenomena. The artist crafts visual scenarios of concealing and disclosing social narratives in the critical tension of human life.
Mabel Hernandez’s The Observing Eye (SPECIAL MENTION AWARD) emerges as a visual architecture where grids and chromatic modules evoke interior landscapes. As a focal point in the canvas, between hard geometries and irregular lines it shows an outlined observing eye that twists representation into observation. Circles and rectangles on layered textures entangled with graphic irregular marks activate dynamic polyrhythmic movements. The interplay between dense material zones and areas of sober chromatic openness creates a visual diagram of poetic intuition. Engaging with the legacy of Latin American geometric abstraction, Hernández craft her work in a sensitive territory where reason and emotion intertwine.
Elba Bello’s Bound (SPECIAL MENTION TO YOUNG ARTIST) painting presents a liminal figure suspended between presence and dissolution. A blurred human silhouette emerges like a spectral trace; its features reduced to minimal gestures that strip away identity and invite projection. Chromatic glazes in ochres and dark tones heighten this ambiguity, creating a psychological space dense with emotion. Echoing existentialist painting and figurative abstract expressionism, the work becomes a “residual presence” that evokes vulnerability and transience. They are a poetic reflection on how contemporary subjectivity dissolves under human trauma and uncertainty.
Alexis Rivero’s Alma Viva performative action (SPECIAL MENTION PERFORMANCE) proposes a hybrid theatricality that merges festive costume, expanded painting, and embodied action within a shared space of estrangement. Through a black-and-white patterns costume, a masked face, and an exuberant millinery, the artist evokes imaginaries of the clown, ritual, and excess, questioning the construction of identity and the artifice of representation. The painted surface on the floor and the dramatic lighting reinforces the pictorial and spectral dimensions of the scene, where the body becomes a device for projection and transgression.
Francisco Cerón, Coca-Cola. The Carbonate Icon, digital print reimagines Coca-Cola as both a global consumer symbol and an object of ironic devotion. Through the practice of intertextual mixing of images, Ceron creates a monumental Coca-Cola bottle crowned by historic variants suggests the brand’s secular sacralization. The vibrant reds and confetti evoke advertising’s allure, while the prohibition sign highlights the contradiction between image and consumption. The urban skyline reinforces Coca-Cola’s transnational reach, turning architecture into a pedestal for its fetish power. Cerón reveals how commercial imagery shapes collective memory, transforming everyday life into a ritual of spectacle.
Milagros Bello, PhD
Curator
@milagrosbellocurator
