{"id":2444000,"date":"2019-05-09T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-05-09T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=305583"},"modified":"2019-05-09T16:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-05-09T22:00:00","slug":"gabriel-ricos-discipline-of-the-cave-at-the-aspen-art-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/gabriel-ricos-discipline-of-the-cave-at-the-aspen-art-museum\/","title":{"rendered":"Gabriel Rico\u2019s \u2018Discipline of the Cave\u2019 at the Aspen Art Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You must watch your step in Gabriel Rico\u2019s show at the Aspen Art Museum. But more importantly, you must pay attention.<\/p>\n

The playful show from this ambitious and cerebral Mexican installation artist is scattered across the floor of the museum\u2019s main first-floor gallery. It includes dozens of small ceramic cacti, bones, Coca-Cola bottles, steaks, an \u201c\u00c6\u201d symbol, dice and more in a desert-like scene. A second gallery, with fragrant pine boughs laid throughout, is home to taxidermy animals including a jarringly lifelike bear, beaver and fox in a lush-feeling forest environment.<\/p>\n

When an overflow crowd gathered at the museum in March for the show\u2019s public opening, museum director Heidi Zuckerman urged patrons to keep their eyes open and their attention sharp.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re on your phone or trying to talk to someone else or deal with your bag, you\u2019re going to step on the art and you\u2019re going to feel bad,\u201d she said, inviting the crowd to enter in silence and with intention, which it did.<\/p>\n

Titled \u201cThe Discipline of the Cave,\u201d the exhibition draws inspiration from Plato\u2019s \u201cAllegory of the Cave\u201d (if your high school philosophy is fuzzy, it\u2019s the one about cave-bound humans watching shadows on the wall and defining their reality and meaning by what they see).<\/p>\n

The works Rico made for Aspen are his shadows.<\/p>\n

\u201cI decided to explore more deeply my relationship with the objects \u2014 how the objects define me and how I came to define the objects and how I define myself,\u201d said Rico, 38. \u201cBecause I can\u2019t define them without knowing who is defining them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The seemingly random objects and symbols in the installation, Rico said, are a projection of his inner being. At first glance, \u201cDiscipline of the Cave\u201d might seem a kitschy, pop-art kind of lark, filled with surrealist Looney Tunes cactuses and familiar iconography. But spend some time with these things, or listen to Rico talk about them, and it\u2019s something else entirely.<\/p>\n

The ceramic Coca-Cola bottles for him aren\u2019t about the nostalgia and American consumerism they often signal in contemporary art, and they\u2019re not about soda. As Rico explained, they\u2019re about transformation, about how the sand of the desert becomes glass and then becomes things like Coke bottles.<\/p>\n

The oversized dice \u201crepresent how lucky we are to be here, to be alive.\u201d The bones laid throughout the room and the skeleton seated in a folding chair aren\u2019t, for Rico, necessarily about mortality, but something more literally uplifting: \u201cBones give us a chance to stand up,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The cacti, desert plant life and snakes are deeply personal for Rico, symbols of his childhood home in Jalisco and what he calls \u201cthe starting point\u201d for his explorations.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe thoughts that I\u2019m investigating in my daily practice are all right here,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

A trained architect, Rico designs spaces rather than just placing a work on a white wall in an antiseptic cube. Rico\u2019s Aspen show offers the rare chance to think about the neglected spaces of museum floors \u2014 usually ignored for sake of exalted walls or pedestals.<\/p>\n

In the animal room, he\u2019s invited Aspen\u2019s environs into the gallery with the live pine branches.<\/p>\n

\u201cI decided to push my limits and push the limits of the gallery and create a kind of fable,\u201d Rico said on an episode of GrassRoots TV\u2019s \u201cArt Matters\u201d about his exhibition. \u201cIf you see the pine branches, it looks like it\u2019s coming from the corners, as if nature wants to come into this space from the outside.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rico has in recent years become one of the standard-bearers for a vibrant and much talked-about contemporary art scene in Guadalajara, where Zuckerman first saw his work in a deserted theater that had been converted into a gallery focused on unrepresented local artists. It included some of Rico\u2019s taxidermy work, which has become a signature of his. Animals are often placed casually in his exhibitions, looking up at the work on the walls. In the Aspen show, the animals all look toward a sun fashioned from branches, a mirror and neon.<\/p>\n

He emerged on the American gallery scene in 2017 with shows in New York\u2019s Perrotin gallery and in Dallas. But this massive solo exhibition \u2014 entirely filled with new work created for Aspen \u2014 marks the artist\u2019s major arrival in the States. He repeatedly referred to the show as \u201cmy major show in the U.S.\u201d<\/p>\n

atravers@aspentimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You must watch your step in Gabriel Rico\u2019s show at the Aspen Art Museum. But more importantly, you must pay attention. The playful show from this ambitious and cerebral Mexican installation artist is scattered across the floor of the museum\u2019s main first-floor gallery. It includes dozens of small ceramic cacti, bones, Coca-Cola bottles, steaks, an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2444000","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-17 23:59:36","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2444000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2444000"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2444000\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2444000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2444000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2444000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}