LA><ART

Eamon Ore-Giron has set his two-channel video installation in a rural village one hundred miles northeast of Lima, 14,000 feet up in the Andes. The village, Morococha, has been split in two by the Chinese mining corporation, Chinalco. In one channel we see the old Morococha. On the other screen Ore-Giron pictures Nueva Ciudad Morococha. Chinalco created the newer planned city six miles away. This new site was built in order to extract copper from beneath the original village. Since 2013, hundreds of residents have been moved.

Geopolitics aside, Morococha is also a meditation on copper as a substance—its color, brilliance and properties. The tube seen digging in the earth before it is replaced in the ground may itself call to mind various modern tropes. From the grit of Arte Povera to the machined aesthetics of Minimalism, from the early morphological experiments of Cubism and Futurism to Leger’s tubular version of figurative art, the video portrays copper between allusive commodity and everyday material.

A work by Peruvian painter Josué Sánchez Cerron comprises the final element in the installation. Ore- Giron purchased the painting directly from the artist, a folk hero in Morococha. Cerron made his name in the 1980s capturing the bloody turmoil that followed the Communist revolt in Peru known as The Shinning Path. Showing the Hades miners descend to daily for their work and the communal life that continues above in their absence, the subject of the painting is a martyr figure lying at the base of the cavern. The painting was taken from a chapel in the old Morococha. Another central motif in the composition, the church has since been destroyed. Cerron's Realism here contrasts Ore-Giron’s own depiction of working-class disappearance and displacement in this part of the world.

Curated by Matthew Schum. The Occasional is made possible with support by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.

About the Artist

Ore-Giron received a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute (1996) and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles (2006). He has had solo exhibitions at MUCA ROMA, Mexico City (2006); Queen’s Nails Annex, San Francisco (2005) and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia (2005). His work was also included in group shows at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; and in the traveling museum exhibition,Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement, which was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and traveled to venues in Mexico, New York and Texas (2008-2009). Ore-Giron has lived in Peru, Spain, Mexico and the Southwest of the United States, which has informed his visual vocabulary. Eamon Ore-Giron's paintings, works on paper and installations blend contemporary graphic design, folk and tourist art, and surrealism in a hybridity of Mexican, South American, Native- American, and other American cultures.

The artist would like to thank Moi Medina, Josué Sánchez and Hugo Ore-Giron.