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Guillermo Galindo's Sonic Biogenesis: Genomics and Mutant Jungles
February 19, 2021 - May 2, 2021

Beacon Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Sonic Biogenesis: Genomics and Mutant Jungles, a solo show by artist and composer Guillermo Galindo. The exhibition will run from February 26th to May 2nd 2021 with an opening reception on Friday March 5th.  

Sonic Biogenesis: Genomics and Mutant Jungles features Galindo’s “genome scores” which consist of graphic representations of his musical compositions and artwork merging textures of plants, animals, and microbes. These pieces illustrate, in Galindo’s unique symbolic language, how research and data have historically expressed and sustained systems of power, particularly relating to colonialism.

The intention of this exhibition is to demonstrate how science, while often considered to be neutral and objective, played – and continues to play – a role in colonizing and conquest. For instance, naturalists were often motivated by the desire for new remedies to treat European ailments (economic or medical) to continue their exploitation of the “New World.” Similarly, biotech corporations today push the boundaries of ethics and possibility as they seek to modify the environment and creatures to best suit the needs of humans. 

The first iteration of Sonic Biogenesis, Sonic Botany was a commission for the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time biennale. It was a response to the exhibit “Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin,” which contained a collection of European codices that visually cataloged the flora and fauna of the Americas.

Galindo calls this body of work an ethno-futurist “window to mutant environments” as he sees a direct link to his artwork and the human-made environmental modifications that are ushering societies around the world towards dystopian futures (events such as Chernobyl, Fukushima, the patterns of Global Warming evident worldwide, as well as the use of the gene-editing tool CRISPR). 

Writer Nick Stone describes Galindo’s Sonic Biogenesis: Genomics and Mutant Jungles series in the following way: “The artist likens this visual strategy to the troubling tendency of corporations to combine plant, insect, and bacterial genomes, creating new species resistant to weather or disease. The paired layers of these works create a shifting, kaleidoscopic sense of movement and visual complexity; each piece appears to change, as if metamorphosing, as the viewer passes by.” 

Stone continues, “Galindo says that these works evoke “mutant jungles,” a comment on the colonization of the microscopic world by corporations. Just as the Spanish colonized the New World, he explains, assigning names to the “new” species they encountered, so do today’s corporate powers use patents to assert their dominance over a world of flora and fauna that is hidden from the naked eye. As the invisible becomes the domain of science – a turn Galindo links to the Greek concepts of mythos and logos, or the overtaking of religious or mythic concepts by reason and science – these works ask us to consider the ways in which contemporary corporations have taken advantage of this shift to manipulate and colonize the territory of the unseen.” 

Art Historian Sugata Ray describes Galindo, saying he “generates a different graphic archive to reconsider the history of imperial bioscience where nonhuman agents take on a far more central role than that has been accounted for in history. The mutant as a product of colonial violence emerges as a leitmotif in Galindo’s work, looping in the past and the present to foreground other voices speaking from beyond the smoke screen of European botany’s universalist hubris.“

Beacon Gallery’s presentation of Sonic Biogenesis: Genomics and Mutant Jungles offers an alternative lens through which we can examine the historical record as well as corporate and nation-building, while also contemplating how events of the past may also be prognosticators of our unfolding future. 

 

About Guillermo Galindo

The work of experimental composer, sonic architect, performance artist and visual media artist Guillermo Galindo redefines the conventional limits between music, the art of music composition and the intersections between art disciplines, politics, humanitarian issues, spirituality and social awareness.


Galindo’s artistic practice emerges from the crossroads between sound, sight and performance and includes orchestral compositions, instrumental works, opera, sculpture, visual arts, computer interaction, electro-acoustic music, film making, instrument building, three-dimensional immersive installation and live improvisation. His acoustic compositions include major chamber and solo works, two symphonies commissioned by the UNAM (Mexico University Symphony Orchestra), the Oakland Symphony Orchestra and choir, and two operas with libretto by Guillermo Gomez Peña and Anne Carson.


Galindo’s graphic scores and three-dimensional sculptural cyber-totemic sonic objects have been shown at major museums and art biennials in America, Europe, Asia including (amongst others) documenta14 (2017), Pacific Standard Time (2017), FIAC Paris (2017- 2018), FEMSA Biennale, Mexico (2020) and Art Basel (2017-20).


His work has been featured on: BBC Outlook (London), NHK World (Japan), Vice Magazine (London; Canada-US), HFFDK (Germany), RTS (Switzerland), NPR (U.S.), CBC (Canada), Art in America (U.S), Vice Magazine Reforma Newspaper (Mexico), CNN, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times (U.S.).


His compositions have been performed at the CTM Festival (Berlin), San Francisco Jazz Festival, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (U.S.), Schrin Kunsthalle (Frankfurt) and The Paramount Theater (U.S.) among many other venues.


In 2011 Galindo embarked on a unique collaboration with lauded American photographer Richard Misrach which became a traveling exhibit and an award-winning book published by Aperture Foundation. Border Cantos features Misrach’s photographs of the U.S./ Mexico border, and Galindo’s sonic devices and graphic musical scores created from detritus left behind by immigrants and the border patrol apparatus.

Selected venues that have exhibited Border Cantos include The Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston (2019), Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, Arkansas (2017), Pace Gallery, New York (2017) and the San Jose Museum of Art (2016). More recently, the Cantor Museum and Stanford University showed their work as part of the exhibition When Home Won’t Let You Stay and at the High Line in New York will feature it as part of The Musical Brain.

In 2017 the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time biennale included Galindo’s solo exhibit Sonic Botany, an installation commenting on genetics and colonization and the environment in a post-apocalyptic world, was shown at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California.

Concurrently to Sonic Biogenesis: Genomics and Mutant Jungles Galindo is composing an opera surrounding the themes of this visual art series. This abstract musical oeuvre, featuring devised instruments and electronics intends to simulate a look into our post-biogenetic future, and is part of a collaboration with San Francisco’s The Living Earth Show. 

Guillermo Galindo currently teaches at the California College of Arts in San Francisco. He was also a Mohr Visiting Artist at Stanford University in 2018 and a resident artist at Vanderbilt University.