Raul Mendez: This is Nowhere

Dec. 1 – Jan. 4, 2009
Reception with Artist: Friday, Dec. 12, 6 – 9 pm

This is Nowhere is a multimedia installation that shifts our regular vantage point and perspective. We are made to look down at a surrounding landscape, as if aloft. The viewer is placed neither here nor there: between floating photographs of clouds, a sectioned metropolis of buildings in the snow, and a painted island, where human dramas unfold and crowds gather to document events for unspecified reasons. A video projected above and onto the small city cycles between night and day, mediating a dark urban cacophony with a ghostly wind in the blue sky.

This piece emphasizes the vexing placeless-ness of our surroundings; This is Nowhere is a cautionary tale, a myth, or a parable. It imagines our human condition as a connection of relationships between us and the spaces we occupy without a central axis. The spinning world is adrift, and this installation attempts to find the precise center of Nowhere.

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The 08/09 visual arts season is supported by Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz; and the John C. Graves Charitable Fund.

Funding Acknowledgements

The Art and Culture Center of Hollywood is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization supported in part by its members, admissions, private entities, the City of Hollywood, the Broward County Board of County Commissioners as recommended by the Broward Cultural Council; the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs, the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; and the Kresge Foundation. We welcome donations from all members of the community who wish to support our work.