https://rebecamendez.com Rebeca Mendez Tue, 04 Mar 2025 18:29:25 +0000 https://rebecamendez.com en https://rebecamendez.com/REBECA-MENDEZ-1 Fri, 19 Apr 2019 22:59:22 +0000 Rebeca Mendez https://rebecamendez.com/REBECA-MENDEZ-1 https://rebecamendez.com/INFO Thu, 20 Jun 2019 18:20:59 +0000 Rebeca Mendez https://rebecamendez.com/INFO “Rebeca has won the three most significant awards in the field of design: The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Communication Design, 2012, the AIGA Medal in 2017, and induction to the One Club Hall of Fame in 2017. This triple crown would be worthy enough on its own, more than worthy, absolutely exceptional, but when you add in that Rebeca is the first and only Latina to win each one of these, much less all three, the achievement is towering.” — Peter Lunenfeld, 2018. SHORT BIO Rebeca Méndez is a highly influential designer and artist who has achieved excellence and distinction in both fields. She has an international reputation as a leading voice in the production of socially-grounded, aesthetically rigorous design, innovative media-inflected arts, and monumental permanent public art. Her current research and practice examine reciprocal relationships and environmental justice in a multi-species world in the midst of climate change, mass extinction, and a ravaging extractivist society. Her fieldwork has taken her to vulnerable environments and communities in the arctic and to threatened ecologies in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Méndez’s diverse works are driven by her interest in perception and embodied experience and they develop within science, design and art, and manifest as immersive installations of video and sound, photography, book arts, and public art. Bridging scientific and indigenous perspectives, Méndez has collaborated with significant science institutions and with Acjachemen, Tongva, Ohlone, and Zapotec communities. Méndez has received significant recognition including her recent inclusion into the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the 2017 Medal of AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts); induction into the One Club Hall of Fame, New York, 2017; and the 2012 National Design Award in Communication Design, bestowed by The White House and the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Her work has been published widely, including in The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Forbes, Flaunt, Telemundo and NBC News. PBS NewsHour’s Art and Culture Series CANVAS showcased Mendez’s January 8th Memorial artwork honoring the victims and survivors of the mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona. Méndez’s work is represented in public and private collections and has been exhibited widely including a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Other venues include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, and at the 55th Venice Biennial. Méndez is a leading academic and industry voice, regularly speaking to audiences across the globe. She is founder of Rebeca Méndez Studio, an award-winning independent design and art studio in Los Angeles. She earned a BFA, a MFA, and received the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from Art Center College of Design. Méndez is a tenured professor and chair in the Department of Design Media Arts at UCLA and is founder and director of the Counterforce Lab, a research studio that harnesses the power of art and design to engage with the reality of the global ecological crisis and its ties to environmental injustice. &nbsp; For more information see Rebeca’s abridged&nbsp;Curriculum Vitae.NETWORK Twitter Instagram Vimeo INITIATIVES / RESEARCH Counterforce Lab https://rebecamendez.com/ART Fri, 03 May 2019 19:42:25 +0000 Rebeca Mendez https://rebecamendez.com/ART https://rebecamendez.com/DESIGN Fri, 03 May 2019 19:44:25 +0000 Rebeca Mendez https://rebecamendez.com/DESIGN https://rebecamendez.com/WALKING-THE-EARTH-OREGON-1 Tue, 04 Mar 2025 18:29:25 +0000 Rebeca Mendez https://rebecamendez.com/WALKING-THE-EARTH-OREGON-1 WALKING THE EARTH: OREGON Permanent public video art installation at the Portland International Airport (PDX), Oregon, displayed on two digital screens, each measuring 20 x 140 feet. Duration: 60 minutes. Inauguration date: January 30, 2025.&nbsp; Inspired by the vision for the new PDX main terminal, as described by architect Sharron van der Meulen, where ‘spaces draw on the fresh feeling of walking through our region’s many parks,’ Walking the Earth: Oregon is an intimate portrait of a human figure walking through all nine ecoregions of Oregon from the Willamette Valley to the Columbia Plateau. The video consists of 54 vertical landscapes, each depicting the artist walking the earth at the horizon line. Experienced in monumental digital screens, the nature walks consist of three cycles of 18 walks each (nine per digital canvas), beginning at dawn and culminating at dusk. The ecoregions depicted are (from left to right): Near Shore, Coastal Range, Willamette Valley, Klamath Mountains, West Cascades, East Cascades, Columbia Plateau, Blue Mountains, and North Basin &amp; Range. The artwork celebrates the magnificent natural environment and the unique regions that Oregonians and visitors worldwide enjoy.&nbsp; <img width="5196" height="2800" width_o="5196" height_o="2800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4b871814aa4f48642c76b86ba8899bf5627ec98e2a3699cfdd18517de6f01898/2024-05-06_PDX_ECOREGIONS_CLOCK_DIAGRAM_18-WALKS-no-text_CROP-2.jpg" data-mid="227895583" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4b871814aa4f48642c76b86ba8899bf5627ec98e2a3699cfdd18517de6f01898/2024-05-06_PDX_ECOREGIONS_CLOCK_DIAGRAM_18-WALKS-no-text_CROP-2.jpg" /> https://rebecamendez.com/THE-SEA-AROUND-US-1 Fri, 28 Oct 2022 16:12:42 +0000 Rebeca Mendez https://rebecamendez.com/THE-SEA-AROUND-US-1 THE SEA AROUND USIn my video installation The Sea Around Us, commissioned by the Laguna Art Museum for the 2022 Art &amp; Nature Festival, I directly reference Rachel Carson’s book of the same title. The installation is a 360° immersive and cinematic experience that portrays the adjacent Pacific Ocean as a fully animated body as well as a place of deep interconnectedness where multispecies kinship fosters a sense of awe within us.&nbsp; The Sea Around Us, 2022. 360° immersive experience consisting of 6-channel HD video and 7.1 surround sound. 34 min. (loop). 1,377 sq.ft., 51 ft. long x 34 ft. wide x 15 ft. high. The Sea Around Us contends with past environmental abuse right off the Southern California coast. Beginning in 1947 and continuing through at least 1961, employees of Montrose Chemical Corporation dumped barrels of the pesticide DDT and acid sludge waste into the ocean near Santa Catalina Island. (In 1972 the Environmental Protection Agency largely banned the use of DDT in the United States because of its adverse environmental effects and its potential risks to human health.) Investigation by scientists is ongoing, but it appears that the equivalent of around half a million barrels of chemicals, including uncontained DDT, was dumped into the ocean at fourteen sites. These toxic materials have bioaccumulated across the food web, affecting the lives of our human and non-human kin. The Sea Around Us incorporates footage captured by robots sampling the contents of disintegrating barrels on the ocean floor. <img width="3584" height="2011" width_o="3584" height_o="2011" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/36ea8a018969b35e5f73b48a5fbf9cb5e4597bf7cd5db41e28670562bc0ad1c4/Rebeca-Mendez-The-Sea-Around-Us-LAM-002.jpg" data-mid="162407947" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/36ea8a018969b35e5f73b48a5fbf9cb5e4597bf7cd5db41e28670562bc0ad1c4/Rebeca-Mendez-The-Sea-Around-Us-LAM-002.jpg" /> <img width="3584" height="2009" width_o="3584" height_o="2009" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/574b80ca958deb3a893ab8bfc133781b1c04c7f8e0b00219eb1284d7b0b3f79e/Rebeca-Mendez-The-Sea-Around-Us-LAM-006.jpg" data-mid="162407948" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/574b80ca958deb3a893ab8bfc133781b1c04c7f8e0b00219eb1284d7b0b3f79e/Rebeca-Mendez-The-Sea-Around-Us-LAM-006.jpg" /> <img width="3840" height="2160" width_o="3840" height_o="2160" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7b4c5f0b02af1ddd1c81ea83de131d638ea49a7c49f5f40dd0714a098dc7f9c0/Rebeca-Mendez-The-Sea-Around-Us-LAM-054.jpg" data-mid="162407950" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7b4c5f0b02af1ddd1c81ea83de131d638ea49a7c49f5f40dd0714a098dc7f9c0/Rebeca-Mendez-The-Sea-Around-Us-LAM-054.jpg" /> <img width="3840" height="2160" width_o="3840" height_o="2160" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f8e873f804f9f8ed0acf876b4d922e6bf7085168a0b72afe44befeb4c9cceee4/Rebeca-Mendez-The-Sea-Around-Us-LAM-020.jpg" data-mid="162407949" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f8e873f804f9f8ed0acf876b4d922e6bf7085168a0b72afe44befeb4c9cceee4/Rebeca-Mendez-The-Sea-Around-Us-LAM-020.jpg" /> In The Sea Around Us, we are guided by the abalone, a shelled marine snail that reflects the time immemorial of the sea, informing the imagery and cosmology of cultures both ancient and present. These include the Tongva people, who began living on Catalina at least eight thousand years ago, and the Acjachemen, who have lived along the coast of what is now Orange County for at least ten thousand years. Poetry inspired by the Tongva worldview frames The Sea Around Us. Flowing through the experience is an Acjachemen song intended to encourage listeners to embrace the natural world through alternative values and worldviews. Ultimately we are asked to be courageous enough to face our exploitative legacy, to take restorative action, and to avoid repeating its folly by being fully engaged as we collectively reckon with and care for our troubled world. Over the last century, extractivism and control of the ocean have engendered environmental catastrophes in the California Bight, one of the most urbanized, industrialized and yet biodiverse bays on the planet. By featuring local Indigenous voices prominently, The Sea Around Us is a call to action to come to terms with the criticality of today’s environmental crises through the expansion of our fixed terranean sensory experience to the ever-changing waterscape of oceanic depths. Immersed in local Indigenous people’s waterscapes long enough, I believe that we can inspire a much needed shift in the ways in which we relate to the ocean and the natural world at large. I commissioned composer Drew Schnurr to create the score for The Sea Around Us, which he describes as follows:&nbsp; “The score reflects our oceans’ beauty, depth, and power, framed by the perspective of feminine strength and indigenous wisdom. A unity of both sung and spoken female voices blended with the sounds of sea life (organic and robotic) represents our collective imperative to reëstablish balance and accordance with our natural world.”&nbsp; &nbsp; https://rebecamendez.com/ANY-INSTANT-WHATEVER-1 Thu, 01 Jul 2021 17:41:43 +0000 Rebeca Mendez https://rebecamendez.com/ANY-INSTANT-WHATEVER-1 ANY INSTANT WHATEVER <img width="2880" height="1200" width_o="2880" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/141e379321106ca9601cdb343a36191e4192db6421b73b1dc1fda0b05740b6b8/2020-02-10_Rebeca-Mendez_ANY-INSTANT-WHATEVER_2880.jpg" data-mid="112822993" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/141e379321106ca9601cdb343a36191e4192db6421b73b1dc1fda0b05740b6b8/2020-02-10_Rebeca-Mendez_ANY-INSTANT-WHATEVER_2880.jpg" /> 2-channel video projection, color, sound. 90 minutes, loop. 16 x 39 feet. Captured in Los Angeles in winter 2019–2020. Sound composition by Drew Schnurr. “Any-Instant-Whatever portrays the daytime sky in its textures and physics of blueness, its range of water formations sculpted by wind and pressures born of our nearest star—forces which, when synaptically processed, transform into emergent sensations of sublime beauty. This is the sky of our closest reach, the sky that most connects us in time to our deep evolutionary past through which we peered into the night’s other and its—until very recently—unreachable horizons.” Excerpt by Stephen Nowlin, director of the Williamson Gallery in Pasadena, curator of SKY exhibition, an immersive examination of how humans have conceptualized the sky throughout history, this group exhibition will demonstrate how the unfolding realities exposed by new science are affecting change in the understanding of ourselves, our planet and beyond. Any-Instant-Whatever is a contemplation of a day in Los Angeles and a homage to philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson whose ideas around duration and time-space have inspired Méndez’s work for decades. Full Description: Méndez documented the sky of Los Angeles in winter 2019–2020 from dawn to dusk. Winter days are precious to Angelinos, as it’s when we receive most of our much-needed rainfall and the city comes to life in the aroma and colors of spring. For this video, Méndez chose to depict one day in early January when the typically blue skies are scattered with clouds—from the low, puffy layers of the ‘Stratocumulus Clouds,’ to the layers of bread rolls of the ‘Altocumullus Clouds,’ the regularly spaced cloudlets, often rippled ‘Cirrocumulus Clouds,’ and the delicate cloud streaks of the ‘Cirrus Clouds.’ All these cloud formations and more may be present in one single day in Los Angeles, as depicted in this video. A Los Angeles cloud-rich sky reminds us of the value of water, as well highlights our good fortune of living on a land enriched by sheer eternal sunshine. It brings to mind the writer Albert Camus (1913–960), who grew-up dirt poor in the French colony of Algiers. Upon moving to Paris he observed that the people of the North were much poorer than he had ever been on the Mediterranean coast, as there at least he always had the sun, the sea and the open blue sky. Los Angeles is rich in the same way, with on average 186 days of full sunshine a year, and 106 days with partial sunshine, for a total of 292 days. Seventy-three percent of a year’s daylight time, the sun reaches the ground in downtown. The sky and the sun in Los Angeles are both great unifying forces, infusing a certain relaxed Southern Californian style in its people, as well as act as equalizers, whose light and warmth caress everyone. People in Los Angeles from all walks of life experience the same sky—something we all have in common. The artwork also investigates aspects of color perception. Since blue light is at the short wavelength end of the visible spectrum, it is more strongly scattered in the atmosphere than long wavelength red light. The result is that the human eye perceives blue when looking toward parts of the sky other than the sun. Any-Instant-Whatever can be understood as a ‘sensate’ or emotional timepiece, serving as a peaceful respite in our busy day, inspiring us to bring together our mind and body as we experience, if just for a moment, the fullness of time expressed in the sky above us. One of the oldest human inventions is the clock—‘rationally measuring time intervals.’ Water clocks, along with the sundials, were possibly the first time-measuring instruments. Our modern lives are tightly organized around the clock, yet our bodies relate to and are influenced by natural time—night/day/twilight (dusk/dawn)—differently. As the viewer enters the gallery they are greeted by a field of harmonious tones of blue, that announce a more natural rhythm to our daily grind. The sky is also shared between humans and non-human creatures who, through migration, interconnect Southern California with the rest of the Pacific Flyway, from the far reaches of the north to the most southern skies of our shared globe. As we change how our skies look and what threats we’ve added along the way—from light to noise to structures to pollutants—our skies are also a space of added threats and population declines. Within human communities across Southern California, the pollutants we release and that wander through our skies affect our human and non-human kin, often disproportionately those who are most vulnerable already. The blue sky of our atmosphere contains a concentration of manmade carbon pollution that is undoing the very stability of our existence. In the words of Sir David Attenborough from a few days ago at COP26, “it’s easy to forget that ultimately the climate emergency comes down to a single number—the concentration of carbon in our atmosphere. We've surpassed 414 parts per million and the safe number is 350 ppm. This single number is the measure that greatly determines global temperature, and the changes in that one number is the clearest way to chart our own story, for it defines our relationship with our world.” Inside the gallery, and of equal importance to the video presentation, is the sound composition for Any-Instant-Whatever by Drew Schnurr. The sounds are derived entirely from resonating crystal receptacles tuned by water. Much in the same way that water vapor in the atmosphere refracts light, crystals (also a refractor of light into component colors) resonate to produce pure sound spectra built upon natural frequency fundamentals that are akin to frequencies producing visual colors in the sky. The composition process involved tuned performance and recording of the crystal resonances, sonic processing of the recordings (akin to how textural water vapor and pollution effect light and color in the sky), conversion of the recordings into digital instrument patches mapped to a keyboard, and then composition and performance of music for these original instruments. The resulting layers and linear musical arrangements of sonic crystal resonance composites unfold according to the video’s designed sequential arrangement of natural visual ranges of frequency (as color spectra in the sky) rendered both simultaneously and over time. Methodology: To create Any-Instant-Whatever, Méndez used a commonly practiced technique in photography called Time-Slice Photography. A Time-Slice image is built from the photographs of a time-lapse and each ‘slice’ is a photograph taken at a different point in time, usually a few minutes after the previous slice. Time-Slice Photography and Time-Lapse Photography are commonplace techniques of Chronophotography, which has been the preoccupation of hundreds of thousands of photographers, artists and scientists for over 150 years. As a video artist, Méndez adapted such technique to video, to compress one day, from dusk to dawn, in 90 minutes, alluding to abstract time, and in turn creating a poetic expression of atmospheric time. The 12-hour day is abstracted into 48 moments of atmospheric time, each 15 minutes ahead of the other so one can experience the ever changing sky above. https://rebecamendez.com/BECOMING-WITH-1-1 Thu, 13 Jun 2019 22:39:27 +0000 Rebeca Mendez https://rebecamendez.com/BECOMING-WITH-1-1 BECOMING WITH #1 <img width="6407" height="3657" width_o="6407" height_o="3657" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/424aec04475329189fe8cf006f08fd27f00ff1289a91bff19f9dbad5c4228053/becoming-with_final_final.jpg" data-mid="52950520" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/424aec04475329189fe8cf006f08fd27f00ff1289a91bff19f9dbad5c4228053/becoming-with_final_final.jpg" /> Becoming With #1 is a single-channel video captured at Eldhraun (“Fire Lava”) lava field in Iceland, which is the biggest lava flow in the world. Enlisting nature as my guide and partner I seek to understand with openness and empathy what my humanity has in common with other species and thus collaborate with nature. I explore how it feels to become someone else or some thing else, to enter the awareness of another species and develop intimate interspecies friendships with the wild, a post-humanist action. In Becoming With #1 the relationship is with the woolly fringemoss (Racomitrium lanuginosum) which is a widespread species of moss found in montane and arctic tundra across the Northern and Southern hemispheres. https://rebecamendez.com/CIRCUMSOLAR-MIGRATION-1 Wed, 19 Jun 2019 19:41:15 +0000 Rebeca Mendez https://rebecamendez.com/CIRCUMSOLAR-MIGRATION-1 CircumSolar, Migration 1 <img width="2448" height="2448" width_o="2448" height_o="2448" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ba2b8cf3fa04e3a75b288ddea206057227ce11c91e269325e71fa9d6f799d385/Rebeca_Mendez_CircumSolar--Migration-1_03.jpg" data-mid="48691705" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ba2b8cf3fa04e3a75b288ddea206057227ce11c91e269325e71fa9d6f799d385/Rebeca_Mendez_CircumSolar--Migration-1_03.jpg" /> CircumSolar, Migration 1 is a single-channel video focused on the migration of the arctic tern, a small sea bird that has the longest migration of all living beings on earth, flying from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back again each year. As such, it experiences two polar summers of 24-hour daylight each year, which makes it the one creature in the world that lives the most daylight. With the tern as its protagonist, CircumSolar, Migration 1 looks to explore larger themes critical to our time, such as the unstoppable force of migration; the ecological concern of climate change and other man-made detritus; the geopolitics of the changing landscapes of coastal lands and the Arctic and Antarctic regions; and at the limit of what is known, the role of the archetypal explorer, who goes beyond to bring back the boon to benefit all. Original score by composer Ben Frost.&nbsp;CircumSolar, Migration 1 was exhibited at Glow, an all-night arts event in Santa Monica beach, on September 28, 2013, 7pm–3am. Rebeca is the first artist-in-residence of Glow. The work is a single channel, 30-minute video projection onto a 25-feet diameter screen, raised above the sand on a circular truss.&nbsp;Exhibition History: Of Sea and Sky, Mount Wilson Observatory, 100-inch telescope dome. July 20–October 20, 2024, curated by Stephen Nowlin. (2-artist show).&nbsp; Muziekgebouw / Rebeca Méndez, TrouwAmsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands, May 20–June 1, 2014, curated by Kim Tuin (solo). Yokahama Triennial 2014, in Here There Be Tyggers at Gallery Lara, Tokyo, Japan. October 25–November 1, 2014. Curated by Kio Griffith (group). Due North / í Nor∂ur, Icebox Project Space, Crane Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, January 9–25, 2014, curated by Marianne Bernstein (group).Glow 2013, Santa Monica Beach, Los Angeles, California, September 27, 2013, a 24-hour event, curated by Marc Pally, David Familian, Meg Linton, Pilar Tompkins Rivas, and Stephen Nowlin (group). https://rebecamendez.com/CIRCUMSOLAR-MIGRATION-3 Wed, 19 Jun 2019 18:05:37 +0000 Rebeca Mendez https://rebecamendez.com/CIRCUMSOLAR-MIGRATION-3 CIRCUMSOLAR, MIGRATION 3 <img width="3200" height="1795" width_o="3200" height_o="1795" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4ede2cd3b6b50f3e9b3d3cbc71de4e331ed4d13918b62c9070df82773ec98efe/Rebeca_Mendez_CircumSolar_Migration3_01.jpg" data-mid="49480874" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4ede2cd3b6b50f3e9b3d3cbc71de4e331ed4d13918b62c9070df82773ec98efe/Rebeca_Mendez_CircumSolar_Migration3_01.jpg" /> CircumSolar, Migration 3 is a contemplation on migratory sea birds captured during their breeding season at Látrabjarg, the western most point of Iceland, which is the largest bird cliff in all Europe—14 km long and up to 440 m high—hosting up to 40% of the world population of some species. At any moment, be it day or night, there are great bird migrations taking flight. Ornithologists estimate that more than 5 billion birds annually journey across the hemisphere. Even greater than the complex weather systems, bird migration is the one unifying natural phenomenon in the world. As an immigrant myself, I am interested on issues of migration, of both animals and humans, and just like birds, we—scientists, farm workers, presidents, artists—journey back and forth dozens of times in the course of our life, establishing migratory patterns. Current immigration crises around the world, and specifically along the Mexico / U.S. border, where hundreds of migrating children, women and men have lost their lives, questions the geopolitics of territorial boundaries.Formally, the video image is experienced vertically, defamiliarizing the seascape, so that the boundary dividing sea and sky becomes unstable and blurred. The spatial shift, together with a low video frame rate furthers this abstraction so we may understand the migratory impetus as code; a genetic code for evolutionary preservation. With this work, I reflect on how we as human species no longer have an understanding of our place within the greater scheme of life. Exhibition History:10th Arte Laguna Prize Final Exhibition, March 20 through April 3, 2016, Nappe of Arsenale Nord, Venice, Italy (group) IV Bienal Ciudad Juárez / El Paso Biennial 2015. Group exhibition. Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez and El Paso Museum of Art. October 11, 2015 – January 24, 2016. Curated by Eduardo Díaz, director of the Smithsonian Latino Center in Washington, D.C., and Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros, curator, museographer and art critic in Mexico City. Istanbul Light Festival, November 13–29, 2015. Zorlu Center, Istanbul, Turkey. Festival Director: Murat Patavi. SUR: Biennial. Group exhibition. Cerritos College Art Gallery. October 8 – November 20, 2015. Curated by James MacDevitt. Realspace, Williamson Gallery, Pasadena, October 3, 2014 – January 18, 2015, curated by Stephen Nowlin.BREART: Residencies4art, part of Brerart Contemporary Art Week, Herman Miller Gallery, Milan, Italy. October 23–27, 2013, curated by Chiara Canali.