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ngela Bonadies, Gato Dom stico from the series Las personas y las cosas/People & Things, 2006-2010. 44 x 51. C-print. | Photo: Courtesy of the artist

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In partnership with 18th Street Arts Center: 18th Street Arts Center is an artists residency program that provokes public dialogue through contemporary art-making.

A stuffed deer poses as if sniffing the corner of a room, backed by closed cabinets and sealed jars. What was dead, skinned, and stuffed, preserved and categorized, seems to have come back to life. The process of archiving is frozen in time, with pieces of Styrofoam, paper, and plastic below the deer's feet hinting at the animal's escape. In effect, the image activates a curiosity towards what is hidden in the sealed jars and closed cabinets. Gato Domestico, photograph by the Venezuelan artist ngela Bonadies, is part of the 2006-2010 series Las personas y las cosas/People & Things, which presents various portraits of archives including boxes of reels, rows of plants, stored paintings, and how the message of the archive is molded according to personal process.

At large, Bonadies' work demonstrates how the folding and unfolding of history is perceived through archives, architecture, memory, and language. She uses photography as performance, intervention, and language, often connecting to issues facing contemporary Venezuela and its history.

Bonadies is in her second and final month of a research residency at 18th Street Arts Center, in preparation for a later commission to be featured in a joint exhibition between 18th Street and LACMA. A Universal History of Infamy is curated by LACMAs Rita Gonz lez and Jos Luis Blondet with Pilar Tompkins Rivas of the Vincent Price Art Museum, and is a project of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, an initiative of the Getty with arts institutions across Southern California. A Universal History of Infamy, which takes its name from Jorge Luis Borges' 1935 collection of short stories (known for moving between the fiction and the nonfiction sphere of real crime tales), will center on alternative Latin American and Latino art practices. 18th Street Arts Center is hosting eight Latin American visiting artists in residence through this initiative in 2016.

ngela Bonadies, Heliamphora Heterodoxa from the series Las personas y las cosas/People & Things, 2006-2010. 44 x 51. C-print. | Photo: Courtesy of the artist

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In Las personas y las cosas, the artist recognized that archives and their messages are dormant unless activated through attentive observation. By photographing the collections of an entomologist, a botanist, the archive of the National Cinematheque of Venezuela, trophies of a marathon runner, and many more private and public collections, Bonadies represents both individual and collective memories. The photographs highlight how the process of preserving and organizing objects can amplify or hide the objects' historical significance. The physical space of the National Cinematheque, the site of many of the photos in Las personas y las cosas, is divided into three sections colloquially known as Heaven , Earth, and Hell, holding classics of world cinema since the 1960s. Film reels in the Heaven section were in a perfect state when found and were recuperated and digitized, making the materials accessible in the contemporary world through reproductions and distributions via the archive's film store. What is placed in the Earth level has yet to be restored, making it vulnerable and at risk of being lost forever. The ephemeral nature of these film reels becomes apparent considering the contents are only accessible via analog technologies, such as film projectors, which are becoming more rare as digital platforms take over. The images found in the Hell level are those reels that cannot be restored to something that resembles their original state, making the material itself evidence of time's ability to decay.

ngela Bonadies, Panor mica de Caracas from the series Red Room Archive, 2014-2015. 24 x 36. Digital print. | Photo: Courtesy of the artist

What is prioritized for preservation, and what is allowed to decay, is a debate that reflects the current state of Venezuela. Bonadies says, There are issues of wills and personal initiatives against, so to speak, [those] of a government that serves to belittle memory in order to rewrite it from scratch. This hierarchy of categories represents a worldview about what deserves to be archived. When things are classified, there is an entire ideology surrounding the classification of those things, and additionally what is selected for preservation and what is selected not to be preserved or kept, she says. Exposing the process of archiving also exposes the process of constructing history. Institutionalized accounts of history tend to prioritize events that are monumental, overshadowing everyday life; a process of fabricating history that links what is considered truth to fiction in that not all facts are presented. Bonadies challenges the objectivity of the historical narrative by presenting its subjective characteristics.

The project itself, a collection of images, also put Bonadies in the position of the archivist in charge of deciding how to present and relate the images she has created. Viewers of the exhibition or publication see images of the film library placed in relationship to a botanical nursery, placed in relationship to a blood bank, to a CD collection, and so on. In developing the project, Bonadies drew from The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by French philosopher Michel Foucault. The book proposes an alter

LINK:	https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/angela-bonadies-venezuelan-artist...
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