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The solo exhibition consists of works from two artwork series, About to Happen, 2006 and Homeland #3, 2006. Curated by Barbara Drucker, Associate Dean, UCLA, School of Arts and Architecture.

About to Happen, 2006.

This series consists of isolated single still frames of Méndez’s 16mm film shoot throughout Iceland. They are presented as triptychs, each frame a few seconds apart from the other. This work focuses on isolating the temporal in phenomena. In _About to Happen, Dettifoss 001–003_, she captures instants of Europe’s largest waterfall — 500 cubic metres per second, and in About to Happen, Brekka 001–003, moments of giant barley grass being forcefully blown by the wind, and in _About to Happen, Karahnjukar 001–003_, a field of cotton-like flowers and three sheep passing by at the site of the controversial ALCOA dam.

Lightjet prints and plexiglass. 16h x 20w inches each.

Homeland #3, 2006.

The Homeland series of works was originally conceived as a site-specific permanent installation commissioned by architect Thom Mayne and his firm Morphosis for a 353,000 sq. ft. student recreation center on the campus of the University of Cincinnati, which opened in May 2006. The installation comprises six murals, measuring 9 by 20 feet each, suspended from the ceiling at the convenience store of the Recreation Center. The 24 composite panoramas – four on each panel– signify the landscapes that supply the raw materials for the benefit of our convenience. Formally, the horizon lines of the landscapes have become thresholds to imagining new, non-existent landscapes where glaciers float over puffy clouds and Nordic cows graze on top of tropical waters. Homeland explores how cultures express themselves through the style of nature they produce at a given time, and the medium out of which they construct this nature. Using personal documentary photography from far-flung places such as Patagonia and the Sahara desert, Homeland presents a sense of ambivalence—while the extreme panoramic images allude to the sublime in nature, they simultaneously reveal their synthetic process of construction. Placed in each landscape is a short line of text—a sensation, a glimpse of a memory, or a moment of an experience triggered by the landscape. The short texts include references to sustainability—’till the last tree’ over an image of cows grassing —pointing back to the core theme of ‘ever sustaining landscapes’ that are being farmed, drilled, eroded and melted, for our ‘convenience.’ The murals occupy an ambiguous space without a clear horizon line—a space that raises questions about what constitutes security and what the cost of convenience might be. Each of the six murals has an overall dominating color – red, orange, yellow, blue, green and white. The first five of these colors correspond to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s National Alert Threat Levels, red indicating ‘severe’ and green signifying ‘low.’ The path toward ‘Peace,’ with its corresponding color of white, are conspicuously missing from the chart, so an additional panel was created. Homeland argues that true homeland security can only come when it includes environmental and sustainability issues among its highest priorities.

Works in the exhibition: Homeland, Peace White, Homeland, Elevated Yellow, and_Homeland, Severe Red_.

Lightjet prints and plexiglass. 16h x 40w inches each.