A creamy and slightly imperfect vertically placed rectangular porcelain slab holds a modest, blue-colored SIM card. The card has been dragged straight from right to left and is smoothly nestled to the left-center of the slab. The SIM card, through some persuasion from artist Tania Pérez Cordova’s (b. 1979, Mexico City) part, has been borrowed from a stranger who agreed to send her calls to voicemail for the duration of the exhibition. Its irregular edges and incomplete corners are minimal and delicate. Cordova’s alluring work Call Forwarding affixes to the GB11 theme “What Does Art Do?” on several levels. It intrinsically requires the transaction of banal yet necessary goods from two parties. An element of trust and submission, though temporary, is called upon, and the primary object is left detached from its function.
Another work from the same series, Lost Earring, displays a Swarovski crystal pierced earring that slightly clings to a piece of brass. The single earring was also borrowed, and in the case of the work selling it will require the buyer to recompose it with an earring of their own. Both intimate and ordinary, Lost Earring’s seemingly abstract and detached infrastructure is also a negotiation.
Cordova’s practice connects poetry, as seen through her work’s titles and material descriptions, with a soft experimentation with various materials ranging from marble, ceramic, wood-fired clay, and foam among others. To this she adds used and borrowed components – some permanent, others evanescent – such as cigarette ash, beer cans, “bronze cast in someone’s pocket,” or reused window glass. The exchange of ordinary objects into the field of art and vice-versa is part playful and part sensitive to the historical connectedness of the elements in space. For Cordova they never stand on their own, they are always linked and associated in some way to a totalness, however slight or regal in scale. JV
self-presentation:
When I was one year old, my parents took me on a 28-hour-long car trip from Mexico City to Colorado. Two decades later, I almost quit art after art school. Today, the important things for my work are often temporary, transient, even banal. They unfold from normality. An underlined phrase in a possibly misunderstood book; on a strange moment a stranger’s comment; a theory I’m sure I´ve once read, though it might have never actually existed; an overheard phrase in someone else’s conversation; domestic rituals; amateur psychoanalysis; ad hoc divination; nothing in particular or the particularity of everything.
