Concha Jerez. Interferences

Born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (1941) and based in Madrid, Concha Jerez is a unique artist in the world of Spanish art. Her career spans 40 years of work in the field of conceptual art, in which she has been a pioneer in Spain.

Jerez lived through the political effervescence of the 1970s, which nurtured her world view with an acute critical vision that has stayed with her ever since. This attitude flows into her work, forming an ethical and transgressive profile that suffuses the way she understands artistic activity.

She deploys numerous formal, aesthetic and technical registers (the moving image, printed text and handwriting, words, sound and silence, space, action and performance, photographic images, installation, objects), as well as works for the internet and radio art in collaboration with artist, theoretician and composer José Iges.

The concepts of Memory, Space, Ambiguity, Time, Landscape and Interference are among the key ideas that feed and define her work.
Dating from 1974 to 2017, the pieces in this exhibition form a historic and conceptual journey through a large part of her work that addresses the idea of Interference, either in the conceptual or spatial field or in the media.

Burnt words, self-censored illegible texts, interrupted conversations, overlapping voices, decontextualised images, the leftovers of informational opulence, dismembered objects, electronic waste, used clothing and footwear, the discarded remains of the excesses of consumer society….

The artist sets up all the mechanisms of interference at her disposal and positions them to create frictions in her “landscapes”, using paradox, visual clashes and altered meaning.

The result is alienation and displacement. The reflections bring us back to a reality which, once again, demands a new way of looking; functional items no longer in use and the remains of banal products form associations that invite us to reinterpret these objects.

Jerez creates a discourse full of discontinuities, of elements that disrupt space and meaning; she uses these metaphors of critical unease about the models of life imposed on us to construct the possibility of envisioning other modes of existence.

The exhibition Concha Jerez. Interferencias brings together some of the most significant installations of the artist’s extensive production, alongside other works such as objects, video productions and photos. These, shall we say, “historic”” pieces are complemented by others created specifically for the space of the CAAM that focus both on the historical memory of the Islands and the present, including the most pressing social problems such as immigration, in which the Canary Islands, because of their geographical location, have a dramatic role.

Alicia Murría
Curator

IMAGE GALLERIES

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