FULLERTON, CA.-Cal State Fullerton Main Art Gallery presents Free Trade Ensambladura, An Installation by Máximo Corvalán, from November 12 to December 16, 2005. Free Trade Ensambladura is an installation by visiting Chilean artist Máximo Corvalán in which the phenomenon produced by the overlapping of postmodern and anthropological spaces can be explored. Through the use of a life-size museum diorama, electronic media and sculpted mummified bodies embedded with neon signs, the installation attempts to call into question concepts of space, time, reality and the staged. The twisted bodies function not only as representation of the macabre link between death, consumerism and cultural tourist attractions, but specifically to the past violent era of Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship with the present.

In Free Trade Ensambladura, Corvalán “uses irony to reflect on landscape: The landscape as scenery inside the gallery. The pictorial landscape is recorded here but not as a citation of art history, but rather as a record of human history pedagogically exhibited, considering that the museum presents verisimilitudes. In this way, Corvalán returns to a topic that has been recurrent in his works: the body as a violence-practice place in which this violence can be interpreted but in which it can also become absorbed, assimilated, even erased by the present political policy as well.” (From “The Horizon of Desolation,” an essay by Sergio Rojas, in the exhibition catalog). Curators: Milka Marinov/Julie Perlin Lee.

CATALOG: Free Trade Ensambladura will be documented with a full-color catalog containing complete installation images and all text in both Spanish and English. Note that this publication will be available by the close of the exhibition. Included are essays written specifically for the exhibition by two current scholars:

Julia P. Herzberg, Ph.D, is an art historian and independent curator whose work focuses on contemporary Latin American, Latino and multicultural artists in the Americas. She has co-curated and organized many traveling exhibitions and has taught, lectured, and published extensively. In October, she will be a visiting professor at Catholic University in Santiago, Chile, where she will give a series of lectures on Ana Mendieta.

Sergio Rojas, Director of the Philosophy Department at Universidad ARCIS (University of Arts and Social Sciences), in Santiago, Chile. He is a published writer of art theory and philosophy as well as a regular participant in conferences and lectures nationally and abroad.

This is Máximo Corvalán’s first solo exhibition in the United States and his premier showing on the West Coast.