Pia Camil: Friendly Fires
Book Launch Party
On the occasion of Gallery Weekend Los Angeles, BLUM presents a book launch celebrating the first monograph dedicated to the practice of Mexico City-based artist Pia Camil. Friendly Fires combines exhibition documentation with material from the artist’s personal archive to explore thirty-two projects from 2006 to now. Join us for music, refreshments, and an artist talk with Camil and César García-Alvarez, founder, director, and chief curator of The Mistake Room, Los Angeles.
As the title suggests, Camil’s work is often done in a climate where kinship and the affective are proposed as a radical way of working in contrast to the highly individualized world. The three illustrated essays delve into this and the artist's oeuvre. Justine Ludwig explores the capitalist critique in the artists’ overall practice; Karen Cordero looks through cloth as a surrogate body to press on the material significance of Camil’s pieces; Cecilia Fajardo-Hill considers the work from a feminist and Latin American perspective, and Elise Lammer and Camil discuss the importance of participatory and collective practices in a multispecies world. The book was designed in collaboration between the artist and Mexican designer Sofia Broid and includes an addendum presented as a poetic visual essay by Gabriela Jauregui. With English and Spanish texts, this book makes Camil’s important contribution to feminist and Latin American practices in the context of late capitalism accessible to a wider audience.
This event is free and open to all. RSVP is encouraged.
Please note this event will be filmed; by attending, participants and visitors consent to video and audio recording and its publication and reproduction.
Limited parking available. Rideshare highly encouraged.
Click here to RSVP.
Saturday, June 29
4pm
BLUM Los Angeles
About Pia Camil
Pia Camil draws inspiration from the urban landscapes of Latin America, engaging with the history of modernism to create paintings, sculptures, performances, and installations. Often using laborious fabrication processes in collaboration with local manufacturers, the artist decelerates the frenetic pace of mass commodification with handcrafted production, as evinced in the intimate quality of her works.
Camil lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico. She has a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI and an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, UK. Her work has been exhibited internationally, with recent solo museum exhibitions including Three Works, MOCA Tucson, Tucson, AZ (2021); Velo Revelo, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (2020); Fade into Black, Queens Museum, Queens, NY (2019); Bara, Bara, Bara, Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland (2019); Telón de boca, Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, Mexico (2018); Split Wall, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK (2018); Fade into Black, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2018); Bara, Bara, Bara, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, TX (2017); A Pot for a Latch, New Museum, New York (2016); Skins, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH (2015); and Cuadrado Negro, Basque Museum-Centre of Contemporary Art, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Araba, Spain (2013).
About César García-Alvarez
César García-Alvarez is a Mexican-born curator and writer. Since 2014 he is the Founding Executive & Artistic Director of The Mistake Room (TMR). At TMR he has organized solo exhibitions and projects with Oscar Murillo, Ed Clark, Vivian Suter, Mandy El-Sayegh, Felipe Baeza, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Hélio Oiticica, Christopher Myers, Henry Taylor, Diana Thater, and Gisela McDaniel, amongst others. He has also curated a host of group exhibitions including Histories of a Vanishing Present—a global survey of video art; Where The Sea Remembers—a survey of contemporary art from Vietnam; and Aqux and Sueñx—thematic surveys of emerging Latinx art in the US. García-Alvarez has also organized exhibitions internationally, most notably, the mid-career survey of Tijuana-based artist Marcos Ramirez Erre at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (co-curated with Kevin Power); the mid-career survey of Eduardo Sarabia at Instituto Cultural Cabañas, Guadalajara; and the US debut of Egyptian artist Wael Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades at the Hammer Museum. Prior to founding TMR García-Alvarez served as Assistant Director and Senior Curator at LAXART. In 2008 he was part of the curatorial team of the 2008 California Biennial and in 2012 he was one of the curators of Made in L.A. 2012, the first Los Angeles Biennial organized by the Hammer Museum. In 2013 the US State Department appointed him as the US Commissioner for the 13th International Cairo Biennial in Egypt and in 2015 he served as co-curator, with Ute Meta Bauer, of TBA21’s first edition of The Current. Most recently he was the co-curator of the 2021 edition of Desert X in the Coachella Valley. García-Alvarez has held various teaching appointments and writes frequently about Latinx and Latin American art. His broader research interests include spatial theory, intellectual histories of the Global South, disciplinary formations, and histories of museological, exhibitionary, and curatorial practices. He lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.