SCREEN

DIEGO RAMIREZ

POSTCARD EXOTICA

Postcard eXotica, 2016, Still Moment No 2, HD Video, 30 minutes

Edition of 5 + 2AP

$3,500

As shown at MEDIA X MUMM Art Central Hong Kong 2017

Diego Ramirez is an emerging multidisciplinary artist and writer. He works primarily with video and other forms of media in the pursuit of developing installation projects for gallery context. His search-based practice seeks to reconfigure representations of racial difference in lens-based media. Ramirez’s most recent work, Postcard eXotica, is prompted by found images that embody the fear and desire that characterises projections of the Other.

Ramirez’s research interests are currently being developed in two streams of practice: delegated performances scripted for cinematic videos and pictures produced with vector graphics. The first attempts to think through the way in which the body is staged and the latter the manner in which it is designed.

Neither idealist nor entirely cynical, Ramirez goal is to scramble the script that dictates power relations in visual culture. Ramirez goal is to scramble the script that dictates power relations in visual culture. Ramirez’s method is best described as active reading, a calculated effort to generate alternative and counter readings of dominant texts. This methodology intends to provoke moments of recognition in which the mechanisms of the text become apparent and null.

Postcard eXotica is a 30 minute cinematic re-enactment in HD Video of a collection of found photographs. More specifically, vintage American postcards produced circa 1900- 1930’s that depict Mexican stereotypes. The work seeks to think through the Western gaze by approaching the pictures as movie scenes and revealing the condition of their making – particularly the way they are scripted, staged, lit and filmed. In a broader manner, the video pastiches early cinema, contemporary pop and horror to trave the ways in which these ideas manifest today.