Motown Took Us There and Motown Brought Us Back (2005-08), Vincent Ramos
Solo Solo is an ongoing exhibition series in which one curator selects one artwork to constitute the entire exhibition.
Solo Solo #3: Natilee Harren selects Vincent Ramos’s Motown Took Us There and Motown Brought Us Back (2005-08) for Los Angeles.
Image courtesy the artist
For this version of the installation, Ramos will fill the gallery from floor to ceiling with sandbags. Beginning before the exhibition opens and continuing until the gallery is impenetrable or the artist becomes insurmountably fatigued. Accompanying the installation will be a series of collages, preparatory drawings, and a soundtrack of hundreds of songs remembered by the men who served in Vietnam with Ramos’s uncle, Forrest Lee Ramos, killed in combat on June 19, 1967 before the artist was born. Since 2005, Ramos has been interviewing veterans from his uncle’s division about the music they remember listening to during the war, in addition to amassing an incredible collection of magazines, books, records, craft objects, and other cultural artifacts from the period. Ramos has created a shifting archive of half-reliable memories and abandoned relics that produce a dialogic constellation through which a sensibility of the world of his lost uncle emerges. Rather than reactivating the objects and narratives through display (as he has done in the past), for this exhibition, Ramos constructs an obdurate anti-monument whose construction recalls the interminably self-imposed task of the collector, the metaphoric slipping away of the “sands of time,” the blockage of the artist’s memory in the face of a profound loss he was not alive to experience, and the perpetual labor of working through such a trauma. Placed in the bunker-like space of the Los Angeles gallery, Ramos’s sandbag structure also references the important June 1967 issue of Artforum, in which a number of landmark essays on Minimalism appeared, including Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood.” The cultures of art and war are brought into an uncomfortable proximity, with the artist having no choice but, in the face of violence and trauma, sacrifice and loss, to continue (to borrow from Walter de Maria) his “meaningless work.”
CLICK HERE for exhibition catalogue
Vincent Ramos lives and works in Venice, California and received an MFA from CalArts in 2007. His work has appeared in Los Angeles at Sixteen:One, 4 F Gallery, and the Mini Wrong Gallery at LA><ART; in New York at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise at Passerby; and in London at the Bart Wells Institute. Earlier iterations of the current project appeared in 2007 at the CalArts Lime Gallery and the CalArts MFA Group Exhibition.
Natilee Harren is a doctoral student in modern and contemporary art history and critical theory at UCLA, working toward a dissertation that will present a new theoretical model for Fluxus. In 2007, she organized DRIP EVENT (for George Brecht), an evening of Fluxus event score performances at PawnShop in Los Angeles. Harren’s writing has appeared in Modern Painters, ArtUS, Athanor, and PART.