MANHATTAN TRANSFER

Manhattan Transfer, Sgorbati Projects, New York City, NY.

Sgorbati Projects is pleased to present an exhibition of sculpture and photography by Livia Corona Benjamin. This will be Corona Benjamin’s first solo show in New York. The exhibition’s title, Manhattan Transfer, suggests the expectation of promise embedded in geography. For Corona Benjamin, who was born in Mexico and currently lives in New York, this idea draws parallel to artistic practice—Manhattan being the assumed epicenter of artistic achievement. The exhibition includes two ongoing bodies of work: English as a Second Language (2015-), is a series of sculptures that pair idioms of American culture with the trade-goods of colonization and current cultural commodities. Infinite Rewrite (2015-) is an ongoing series of unique photographs created from a single negative, and modified through experimentation in an analog color darkroom. Important to Corona Benjamin, is the state of arriving and the repetition of task often associated with this process—the mechanical aspects of getting there. Visually disparate, the works in both series echo the stream of consciousness narrative and interwoven stories present in the 1925 John Dos Passos novel, from which the exhibition’s title is taken. The sculptures of English as a Second Language (2015-) parody mastery of the English language as a crucial necessity for the non-English speaker to become more globally relevant. Phrases of dubious utility, “Beer Before Liquor” or “Red and Yellow Kills a Fellow” which purport to improve life experience or improve chances of survival in the wild—if only recalled correctly under their respective contextual duress—find themselves entwined with leather, fur, silver and basketball. Corona Benjamin additionally incorporates phrases that reference souvenir tourist t-shirts. Another Day in Paradise (2015) is spelled out with silver curio-shop keychain letters, evoking the manufactured ennui of Mexican vacation resorts as well as that of the foreigner transplanted to the US—or more accurately, the Mexican artist at work in her Manhattan studio. The eighteen photographs exhibited as part of Infinite Rewrite (2015-), use and reuse a single image taken by the artist as part of an archive documenting repurposed grain silos, the remnants of a flawed and abandoned agricultural program instituted by the Mexican government. The conical building, devoid of its original purpose in function, and now as image, becomes Tabula Rasa for the artist’s light studies as an indefinite exercise. Through an analog process, the image is fractured into marks of color not present in the original black-and-white negative. Resembling tightly formed brushstrokes, these marks overlap and recombine to form shifting optical patterns. The obscured but emergent image is thus stripped of any discernible sociological or documentarian intent. Acknowledged is the immigrant's inevitable shedding of political baggage from ‘the old country’ in the process of assimilation—of becoming “naturalized.” One work in the series, Dream Acts (2015), whose colors are derived from the LGBT pride flag, reintroduces a political narrative disjointed from pictorial subject matter. Referenced is the fight for marriage equality, celebrating, after a lengthy holding pattern, one fulfillment of American promise.