Lauri Firstenberg is the founder and Director/ Curator of LAXART. She received her Ph.D. From Harvard University in the History of Art and Architecture Department.
Los Angeles-based artist Marco Rios produces theatrical sculptural installations and humorous performances featuring his sculptural works. His Fangoria (2005) —a temporary sculptural installation executed in a university building in Irvine, California—creates a context where the viewer becomes a voyeur peeping into a ruptured wall which reveals a desk, chair and waste bin floating and drowning in a sea of red enamel. In Fangoria's highly polished red surface as a pool of blood, Rios reveals his preoccupation with theatre, kitsch, paranoia, death, delirium, mystery and the unconscious. Rios’ building becomes a body. Devoid of subjectivity, the haunted space disrupts the clean, hygienic, academic setting it occupies. Rios’ unique vision of this building as corpus, transforms generic and institutional architecture—the site of modernist planning, neutrality and science—into an irrational space: the subject of murder and terror.
In a like fashion, Rios' Rigor Motors collaboration with artist Ruben Ochoa represents two car/coffin sculptures and similarly anthropomorphizes habitual objects. In this early sculpture Rios and Ochoa envision a contorted and distressed body encapsulated in vessels of violence. Yet, as in all of Rios’ work, this psychosexual nightmare is punctuated with a high gloss patina.
Rios’ newest work to date, Moving Equilibrium (2006), includes a performance, object and a video component. A university gymnasium is the site for this spectacle. The artist, wearing a weight lifter's short spandex unitard, attempts to elevate and balance a monumental sculpture of a level over his head. The drum rolls, applause and encouraging gawking from the audience culminate in Rios and the level clumsily dropping to the ground. The piece ends with this pristine and gloriously overblown object weighing the artist down.
