The UNLV art department's spring 2018 artist in residence, Cayetano Ferrer, lectures in the Barrick Museum of Art auditorium at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, March 7. The talk is free and open to the public.
At the core of Ferrer's practice is the treatment and transmutation of cultural objects and symbols, pulling from popular iconography to art historical artifacts. These forms typically arrive at the artist's attention with complex, and often ambiguous, histories attached. Subsequently, the work often contributes to the chronological uncertainty of the subject matter, and at other times reveals obfuscated narratives embedded in the forms. His work within and around the institutions responsible for preserving and presenting objects of cultural significance introduces questions about the process of mediation that is necessarily undertaken by museums. Working in these and other locations, the physical and historical absences that attend cultural fragments have become a site for Ferrer to diffuse the boundaries of the art object and utilize context as both a framing device and material.
Ferrer was awarded a 2015 Art + Technology Lab grant from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and in 2013, Ferrer was an Artadia Award for visual art. His most recent solo exhibition, Tropos, was staged in a former grain mill in Buenos Aires Argentina, and he has recently exhibited at group shows at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo (2017) and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (2017). In 2015, Ferrer realized his first solo museum exhibition at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Ferrer’s work has been exhibited at the Hessel Museum of Art in New York (2015); at the Swiss Institute in New York (2014); in collaboration with other artists, musicians and architects at Human Resources, Los Angeles (2014); at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park and a billboard in Hollywood as part of Made in LA (2012), the Hammer Museum's first Los Angeles biennial.
