The Trickster, defying physics and gravity, snaps in and out of KOOZA, the world he has put together for The Innocent. Flashy, exotic and entertaining, he is thirsty for souls. He creates a world of rhythm—at the pace through which society flows—presenting the boy with the endless pleasures of life. Through a total of ten acts, we learn that there is a quest for identity in everyone’s life even in the darkest of all places.

GENEVA GAMEZ-VALLEJO | March 2010

Call it discipline. Call it coordination, production or even practice. Call it what you may. But what Cirque du Soleil brings to the stage is a phenomenal piece of art, time and again.

On their new venture through our city, Cirque brings KOOZA (from a Sanskrit word meaning 'box' or 'coffer'); the tale of The Innocent, a young and loner boy and his quest to find his place in the world.. The show that starts off with a live orchestra of different characters dressed accordingly, is swirled by varied artistic tenors. It sets its tone with a script that needs few words to create the ambiance of a naive world darkened by the evil forces in our day to day.

The boy in striped pajamas stands alone on the stage, rides his tricycle and is marveled by the very thought of seeing his kite fly. His subconscious is taken over by a great force of darkness and impurity, presented by the Trickster, yet he remains innocent at heart. Melancholically, he wonders why he is alone in life.

The boy receives a jack-in-the-box toy that springs to life a castle-full of hysterical characters that quickly take over his adventure and introduce the audience to The Innocent’s journey as he searches for his identity.

The Trickster, defying physics and gravity, snaps in and out of KOOZA, the world he has put together for The Innocent. Flashy, exotic and entertaining, he is thirsty for souls. He creates a world of rhythm—at the pace through which society flows—presenting the boy with the endless pleasures of life. Through a total of ten acts, we learn that there is a quest for identity in everyone’s life even in the darkest of all places.

Each act is mesmerizing and unrelated to the previous or the next. The audience will be mesmerized by four acts in particular. The Contortion, a jaw-dropping simple act of three staged upon a small wooden circle that will make you drool or at the very least, wring your hands like pretzels every time you see the forms created by the performers who embody surrealism ever so gracefully. It is beyond what you can imagine three rubber bands diligently twisted and curled could look like.

The High Wire act, performed by perfectly fit Spanish men is also a wonder in itself. The Unicycle Duo rides around the stage ever so sensually, and another sensuous couple in the Wheel of Death, dressed in spiky leather pants and with an unreasonable urge for an adrenaline rush, makes everyone under the big-top tremble with fear.

Truly a spectacle to see in KOOZA Cirque du Soleil takes some of its best elements and combines them with the silliest of slapstick comedy, resulting in an extraordinary show which resonates and presents art at its best every which way you look at it.

Tara Donovan, Untitled (Styrofoam Cups), 2008, Styrofoam cups, hot glue, dimensions variable. Artwork © Tara Donovan, Courtesy of the Artist and PaceWildenstein. Photo by Dennis Cowley.

Tara Donovan:

A Materialistic Splendor

By GENEVA GÁMEZ- VALLEJO | October 2009

I remember the first time I experienced Tara Donovan's work back in 2006 at the Pace Wildenstein's gallery on West 22nd Street in New York. The “Untitled” installation –as many of them are- consisted of 3 million white plastic cups, resembling a topographical landscape. The piece valued at $350,000. I was mesmerized, not by the zeros tagging along the dollar sign, but by the intensity of the mountain of cups measuring approximately 5’x 50’x 60’ occupying the center of the gallery. To think of the time, the labor and thought behind it was fabulously conceptual. Needless to say, when I found out she’d be in San Diego, my heart yearned for a moment like back in 2006, when all was white and surreal in a room full of roaming art driven goers.

Tara Donovan, Untitled 2008. Transparent polyester film Artwork. © Tara Donovan, Courtesy Pace Wildenstein, New York. Photo by Dennis Cowley/ Courtesy Pace Wildenstein, New York.

Awarded the 2008 MacArthur “Genius Grant”, the MacArthur foundation described Donovan as “…an inventive young sculptor whose installations bring wonder to the most common objects of everyday life” adding on that “Donovan’s site-specific, sculptural works transform ordinary accumulated materials into intriguing visual and physical installations.”

Donovan’s work can be perceived as intricate as having to count the grains of salt that fill a cup. She doesn’t start working on a piece, without first deciding what kinds of materials she’s going to use. Due to the site-specific process of her installations, her work usually needs to be reassembled from scratch per exhibit –an art form in itself. Entitled simply "Tara Donovan" and organized by the Institute of Art/Boston, the exhibition is one you cannot let pass without appreciating.

Not too often does our city have the pleasure of experiencing the work of one-of-a-kind artists as such -which is why it is nearly an honor to know that Tara Donovan's work has taken over some of the space at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. In this show, the piece showcased features mounts of styrofoam cups curving on and about the ceiling like a dimensional illusion of a photograph you’re more than likely to experience in a biology book.

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Tara Donovan” is a nationally touring exhibition that surveys the artist’s work in a museum-like environment for the first time in San Diego. The exhibition runs from Oct. 25, 2009 – Feb. 28, 2010 at the Jacobs Building at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Downtown San Diego. www.mcasd.com.

By GENEVA GÁMEZ-VALLEJO | November 2009

Two years after CUBO, comes CUBO: MediaWomb, a collaborative project that explores the reflection of how social space and public culture can be transformed and embraced by people.

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To understand this new embodiment of the project, you should know how CUBO came to life. Back in 2007, local artist, Camilo Ontiveros and colleague Felipe Zuñiga explored the idea of creating an object that could bring together the notion of social architecture through a transportable sound sculpture whose sound track would respond to site-specific locations. They created CUBO, an orange plastic cubed transformable object that articulated experiences in its interior and exterior.

By its final phase, CUBO had a total of 14 collaborating artists of various mediums. Its goal was mainly focused towards provoking the irruption of different sonorous gradients, incessant voices, ephemeral chronics, and ambient episodes in the city of Tijuana. CUBO made its first appearance in our border city of Tijuana, then in Los Angeles and San Diego.

MediaWomb is an organic transplant of the first CUBO, embodied in a different structure –one where the audience is not only allowed to listen in on, but also invited into. This new project is put together once again by Camilo Ontiveros and Felipe Zuñiga, with special collaboration by Giacomo Castagnola and Nina Waisman.

The artists describe CUBO: MediaWomb as a project that “began as a dialogical exercise in response to the media's monomaniacal presentation of Mexico as a space characterized solely by sensationalist crime. The collective wanted to complicate this image, by exploring the under-represented terrains of community and non-violence, to generate layered reflections on locality, media and material geography in relation to the body and its interactions.”

For Ontiveros, it was of extreme importance that the new CUBO would once again, reach out to the public and create some sort of reflection and discussion about news, words and sounds that surround us daily.

“…In my practice, I have focused on creating platforms for dialogs. My intention with this has been to look for alternative ways, both inside and outside existing conventions, to open forums for discussing politics and aesthetics.” He added, “In conjunction with this, my work often deals with questions about the systems that produce the societies in which we live. So, the opportunity to investigate the effects of media and open up a site for reflection to be manipulated by your own body was something that excited me about the CUBO: MediaWomb.”

Some of MediaWomb’s embodiments include mobile sculptural-sound interventions, sound and music performances, ephemeral radio transmissions, and youth-at-risk workshops in the cities of Tijuana and Los Angeles.

Taking the opportunity to sit inside of CUBO: MediaWomb and listen in on some of the clips that the media feeds us is quite extraordinary. The structure resembles an upside down sofa that wombs the guest in warmly, and is composed of recycled egg cartons, uniquely constructed by Castagnola. It has a set of dynamically impressive motion sensors that create sound, and speakers on the side that have endless news stories to tell.