NARCOMANTAS (HANGED MEN TRIPTYCH), 2015
A triptych of hanging packing tape phototransfer collages on vinyl.
NARCOMANTAS (Hanged Men Triptych) video detail NARCOMANTAS (Hanged Men Triptych) video detailthat were originally shown in 2015 during the exhibition FRONT AND CENTER at the Hyde Park Art Center, curated by Tricia Van Eck. One of them was later shown in 2016 during PRESENT STANDARD, at the Chicago Cultural Center. The exhibition catalog included an essay by Alison Fraunhar that reads:
Ivan Lozano was raised in a city that no longer exists. Through decades of rising narco-cultura, the Guadalajara, Mexico in which he grew up, indeed the entire country, has been remade into a stage for the performance of pervasive and constantly escalating violence and fear. Those who lack the luck or the opportunity to escape have become inured to the spectacle of atrocities that mark the city and countryside. Lozano deploys the lexicon of Hannah Arendt’s famous formulation of “the banality of evil” through the appropriation of images of violence from news media, literally re-inscribing media by reformulating filmstrips into unique artworks, forcing us to see the images that flood our vision every day. His strategy implicates the media in the production as well as the dissemination of the spectacle, and he snatches these images of violence from our benumbed pornographic spectatorship and forces us to acknowledge our complicity in their persistence.