Jorge Sosa
Sonora Blank

30th May - 29th June

29th May - Private View

One perceives the facts of the outer edge, the flat surface, the banal, the empty, the cool, blank after blank; that infinitesimal condition know as entropy. R.Smithson, ‘Entropy and the new monuments’ (1966)

David Risley Gallery proudly presents a second solo exhibition of Jorge Sosa’s work. Sosa has compiled a series of sculptures, drawings and posters that investigate frontier spaces between Mexican dance halls, Mexican saloons and the music that fills them.

Sosa’s sculptures reconstruct an abbreviated and capricious genealogy of the origin of all the things of the world. Musical instruments, dance shoes, spurs for a cockfight or a luxury rabbit fur coat are examples of objects that are placed together to build a network of meaning that does not seek to limit irreversibly the potential of each object but to relativise their political content and to show the economic characteristics that are implicit in their construction.

Each object stems from very diverse seams of reality, basic work tools or the residue of some delirious moment; they are objects found in diverse circuits of the market that interlace the circulatory system of the precarious economy of Sosa’s country, Mexico.

Sonora Blank is an invented Mexican group, named after the Smithson quote about entropy. The ‘sonora’ musical groups are held very dear in Latin America as is their music which has generated and transformed collective and intimate realities. The historical Mercado Sonora in the centre of Mexico City, a complex cultural, economic, and social system in itself – is a market well known to Sosa who is fascinated by the strange culture surrounding the objects being traded there.

For the first time, Sosa presents drawings and posters. The series of Mexican, image-based street posters mixes satire with candour and crude delight – sarcastically defining identities of each ‘sonora’. The drawings create a likeable territory where knowledge is altered. His images are plucked from newspapers, magazines, posters and old books. Sosa visits the old bookshops in Mexico City that sell rejected books at bargain prices as a source for his images. Their resurgence here in his ink drawings gives them a place in new economic and cultural circuits.

Jorge Sosa studied architecture at Universidad National Autónoma de Mexico and Visual Arts at ‘La Esmeralda’, National School for Painting, Sculpture and Engraving, where he is now a lecturer in ‘Strategies and Improvisation in Contemporary Art’. His works are in private collections worldwide.