MOCA Pacific Design Center
The first exhibition of this Cuban artist’s work organized by a museum in the US, Carlos Garaicoa features recent architectural models, renderings, drawings, photographs, videos, and installations created by the artist in response to the turbulent architectural history of Cuba since the revolution of 1959. Garaicoa’s early work consisted of anonymous interventions on urban facades, using dilapidated structures to explore the theme of failed utopia. In the mid-1990s, he began producing a series of diptychs juxtaposing before and after photos of decrepit buildings and their ruins, a ghostly outline of the structure traced in colored thread over the latter image. Examples of these series are presented in the show, alongside works like From the Series New Architectures (2003), a floating, miniature city made of 76 glowing rice-paper lamps; Campus or the Babel of Knowledge (2002–04), two utopic architectural models of a college campus, accompanied by a dystopic explanatory text; and Capablanca’s Real Passion (2004), a chessboard with its pieces transformed into miniature buildings.
Carlos Garaicoa is organized by Alma Ruiz, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.