In Southwest Contemporary Vol. 12: OBSESSION, curator and guest juror Raphael Fonseca finds a surprising scope and range of artistic obsessions.
“There are no limits to a world with so many obsessions.”
—Raphael Fonseca
When Southwest Contemporary first invited me to review the submissions and select artists under the theme of “obsession,” I expected that I would come across research that revolved exclusively around the notions of accumulation, cataloguing, and archiving. Carol Sogard and Joel Swanson, part of this final selection of ten artists, have worked in this direction: they deal directly with repetition, organization, serialization, and arranging images within their images.
However, during the evaluation process, I encountered other practices that taught me different ways of dealing with the proposed semantic field. Some artists here have works that revolve around reusing mostly industrial materials and recoding them into sculptures, installations, and various actions. In the obsessive sculptural inquiries of Hilary Nelson, Karl Orozco, Philip Gabriel Steverson, and Taylor Engel, there is a desire to deal directly with the materiality of culture, with the notion of waste, and with the anti-ecological remnants of unbridled consumption that constitutes not only such an essential part of American identity, but affects the entire world.
Cande Aguilar and Justine Kablack‘s practices start from the encounter between visual patterns, displacement, and repetition. Their research deals with chance and forms of signaling in the relationship between body, movement, and public space. Finally, speaking of the public sphere and bringing the discussion to the human body and its many gender intersections, jesse lovell and Luca Berkley deal directly with obsessions with self-image and the potential that photography, video, and the internet have to shape characters that both create universes and respond to certain archetypes of American society.
In the same way that I was surprised by and learned from not only these ten artists but also from all those who applied, I invite the reader to do the same and see how a geographic region in the United States—the same one that gives its name to this publication—brings together many media and existential desires that teach us that there are no limits to a world with so many obsessions.
The ten artists featured in OBSESSION are:
Cande Aguilar
Luca Berkley
Taylor Engel
Justine Kablack
jesse lovell
Hilary Nelson
Karl Orozco
Carol Sogard
Philip Gabriel Steverson
Joel Swanson
