SHORT BIO:
Rebeca Méndez was born in Mexico City and received her MFA from Art Center College of Design. She is currently a professor in the department of Design | Media Arts at UCLA. She has shown her work at ARCO Madrid 29th International Art Fair; X Biennial, Cuenca, Ecuador; the National Design Triennial; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Beall Center for Art and Technology, University of California, Irvine; the Alyce Williamson Gallery, Pasadena; the Broad Art Center, UCLA; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Her work is represented in public and private collections, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York; the Denver Art Museum; the Freitag Historical Museum, Hannover; and Museo José Luís Cuevas, Mexico City. Méndez lectures internationally, and reviews of her work have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Eye Magazine, Metropolis, and I.D. Magazine, among others. Méndez has received extensive international recognition, including artist residencies at the Gunnar Gunnarson Institute in Iceland and at The Arctic Circle. Méndez is a California Community Foundation Fellow and member of the Artist Pension Trust, México City. Méndez’s art practice is in various media—photography, 16mm film, video, and installation—with which she explores the nature of perception and media representation, specifically how cultures express themselves through the style of nature that they produce at a given time and the medium through which they construct this nature. She moves through different scales with ease—from photographic prints, to immersive sound and video installations, to murals of more than 25,000 square feet, to installations involving sixty-foot boulders and tons of lava rock. She considers the journey as a medium in itself and has produced a significant body of work based on travels to unfamiliar and extreme places such as Iceland, Patagonia, and the Sahara, where she is awakened to a heightened level of perception. Méndez’s interest in the nature of matter—in cycles and systems, specifically the forces and cross-rhythmic tensions that make natural phenomena emerge—stem from her growing up in two seemingly entropic environments, Mexico City and the Mexican jungle, where she would follow her father in pursuit of Mayan archaeology. Common to both environments is hypercomplexity, multiplicity, and constant change. Méndez’s move to Los Angeles and her expeditions to geologically young Iceland have furthered this impetus. Méndez’s work is driven by the concept of élan vital, developed by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who described it as “the explosive internal force that life carries within itself,” which he claimed animates all being. Her At Any Given Moment series is further informed by the ideas of the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who said: “We are all transistors, in the literal sense. People always think they are in the world, but they never realize that they are the world.” As explained by cultural theorist Sanford Kwinter, what Stockhausen means is that there are no phenomena in the natural world that do not manifest themselves as vibratory or rhythmic phenomena. Those vibrations attack us; they modulate us and, in the end, become us. Rebeca Méndez lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Adam Eeuwens, and their two cats.
Photograph by Melodie McDaniel
MORE BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION:
Rebeca Méndez was born and raised in Mexico City and lived many summers in a camping tent, deep in the jungles of Chiapas and the Yucatán peninsula following her father and mother, both chemical engineers by profession, to uncharted territories in search of Mayan archeological sites that had been reclaimed by the jungle. From them, she acquired the curiosity, resilience, and spirit of the explorer—one who discovers and sees the world anew, as well as the empirical and determined mind of the scientist—the one who investigates, experiments, and proves.
Growing up immersed in the city and the jungle, both seemingly entropic environments where coexistence, multiplicity and change are the only constant, and filtered through the mind of a chemist, set the course to her interest in systems—specifically the forces and cross-rhythmic tensions that make natural phenomena emerge.
Méndez moved to Los Angeles in 1980 to study at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Upon graduation (‘84) she stayed in the city and built a life and career as a renowned designer and creative director recognized by institutions such as the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art with group and solo exhibitions. Méndez returned to Art Center to receive an MFA (‘96) in fine art under direct advice of artists such as Mike Kelley, Lita Albuquerque, Diana Thater, and Bruce Yonemoto. In 2003 Méndez became full professor at UCLA, in the Design | Media Arts department, which was a determined choice to focus her attention to fully develop her art research and practice. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Rebeca Méndez has participated in numerous exhibitions worldwide and her work is represented in public and private collections including Enrique Norten, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Design Museum, New York, Denver Art Museum, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and Museo Jose Luis Cuevas, Mexico City. Recently her work was exhibited at the Pompidou Centre in Paris as part of the exhibition ‘Morphosis: Continuities of the Incomplete.’
Méndez’s art practice is in various media—photography, video, and art installations, with which she explores the nature of perception and media representation. She moves with ease in scale—from intimate photographic prints, to 60 feet boulders, 4 tons of lava rock, immersive sound and video installations, to murals of over 25,000 square feet. She considers the journey as medium, and travels to unfamiliar and extreme places like Iceland, Patagonia, and the Sahara because of how profoundly they make her feel as the world.
An example of how Méndez’s thinks about her work is her recent video installation artwork series At Any Given Moment, which was conceived and captured in 16mm film during her travels to Iceland in 2006 and 2008. This work explores issues of perception, specifically our relationship to technologically mediated nature. At Any Given Moment, Fall, is an installation comprised of an 18×13 feet video projection and an equal size lava field. The video projection is a tight crop, large-scale image of a waterfall, whose repetitive rhythm and speed variations, breaks down the descriptive and emphasizes its particular organizational logic in time and space. Allowing us to view ourselves from the outside, as part of the representation, we learn about ourselves and challenge preconceptions of our surroundings, specifically of the nature of matter. The cross-rhythmic tensions between simple elements in the waterfall—each drop of water falls at variable speed, variable light and variables of atmospheric conditions—create visual difference and reveal the patterns that one simple form, a drop of water, produces through relationships and complex organization. At Any Given Moment, Fall was recently exhibited in Scalable Relations at the Beall Center for Art and Technology in Irvine, California, curated by Christiane Paul, curator of media art at the Whitney Museum.
Another recent work is Weatherscapes which is a photographic series created last summer during an art residency Méndez received at Skriduklaustur in Iceland (2008). Weatherscapes explores the relationship of the weather and the landscape as it relates to human scale. Weather—fog, lightning, rain, clouds—inhabits the otherwise vast abstract space between the body and the distant horizon. Weatherscapes captures a more compact environment, one that the body can engage with physically, creating a continuous and intimate ensemble between the body, the weather and the landscape. The subtleties and the nuances in these images become more prominent and acclimatizes the viewer to a more delicate vocabulary in viewing the work.
Her research and practice are transmedial and interdisciplinary—as an artist, through her photography, videography and installations, Méndez explores the dialogue between the weather and the landscape as a way to address issues of time and space in relation to human physicality. As a designer, her research and practice focuses on critical reflections on visual communication practices, in particular on brand identity and consumer culture, to encourage formation of independent opinion and participation. Méndez’s art and design research intersect in her study of architecture as interface and interface as a kind of architecture connecting people through immersive spaces, physical objects and systems to local and global networks.
Méndez collaborations continue to be with leading figures around the world including Pritzker Prize Laureates Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne, UCLA professor Richard Weinstein, architects Greg Lynn and Enrique Norten, artists Bill Viola and Rubén Ortiz Torres, film directors Mike Figgis and Rene Daalder, and writer Adam Eeuwens.
Méndez consults and lectures internationally and has been reviewed extensively, including The Los Angeles Times, Eye Magazine_, Metropolis, I.D. Magazine, 34, Creative Magazine, RES, Communication Arts, Graphis, Business 2.0, Ronda, Idea, and Plazm Magazine. She has received numerous awards, including a Platinum Award (2008) and a Gold Award (2007) from Graphis, AIGA, The ONE Club, RESFEST, and has been twice nominated for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award and the Chrysler Design Award.