antonio jose guzman

reconstructed landscapes

The Reconstructed Landscapes series challenge the traditional notion of space and time by visualizing the aesthetics and perception of indescribable transformed subjects. In contemporary society with everything moving so fast, we perceive time differently that our ancestors, our relation with time is different depending on the society, culture, and the communities we live in. Reconstructed landscapes intend to perceive time in imagined spaces and structures; This series of earth works and sculptures try to conceive the causes and results of human displacement, creating diverse ambiguous and unfamiliar land art installations.

Most of the sculptures were thought during the Dakar Biennial, residencies in Los Angeles, Air Antwerp, Belgium and Flaggfabrikken Bergen, Norway; some of the works are landscape sculpture proposals to the Norwegian international art project Artscape Nordland, 3D maquettes for Project Piertopolis and repaired photographic reconstructed interventions on forgotten structures.

The Artscape Nordland project originated in a comprehensive debate about the role of art in society. The County of Nordland, with its 240.000 inhabitants, does not have an art museum – and people must travel long distances to study modern art in museums and galleries. The underying idea of the project is that a work of art creates a place of its own through its very presence in the landscape.

www.skulpturlandskap.no

Cities:  Los Angeles – Dakar – Panama – Lofoten – Bødo

Digital C-prints 80 x 120 cm | 40 x 60 cm
Edition of 15 + 2 A.P
Numbered and Signed
All works & photos © A.J. Guzman
2010 – 2013

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Présence

selected works

Over the past decade I been searching for a visual definition of notions like migratory aesthetics, gravity, locality, transit, geopolitics, ancestry and identity. My work question the role of my ancestors in a post colonial society and ultimately in the contemporary world. Mobility is a fundamental social and historical aspect of life. Images of movement and transit in general have a huge influence in contemporary society. For Présence, I engaged myself in a sociocultural historical study of the meaning, function, and aesthetic significance of photographs in West Africa. Spanning the dynamic periods of colonialism, national independence, socialism, and democracy.

Cities: Dakar

All Photos © A.J. Guzman
2003 – 2013

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Between Immaterial Lines

Selected Works

This series of analogue and digital drawings on photographs explore the dependency between individuals and the space they inhabit in elapsed times, using photography and drawings to blur and destroy the personal identity of the portraits spaces. The overlapping drawing techniques between digital and analogue emphasizes both my psychological and artistic obsession on the relation we have with street navigation, past and future spaces. Using this combination of techniques I create new landscapes of isolation through an exploration of architectural concepts. Digital image manipulation and technical drawings have been exploited in this series to create work that is complex on line repetitions. The lines represent almost data visualizations of old navigation maps. Maps are graphical representations of spatial and geographical relationships between humans and their environment. The drawing lines on the series relate to grids and structures imposed on the world, not necessarily corresponding to our experience of spaces, but they portray immaterial factors such as relationships, directions and orientation in our daily life.

Cities: New York City

Digital Scan – C-prints 34 x 44 cm
Edition of 15 + 2 A.P
All works  © A.J. Guzman
2012 – 2013

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increasing patterns

Selected Works

Since its beginning, the city of Los Angeles was geographically divided by ethnicity. In the 1920s, Los Angeles was the location of the first restrictive covenants in real estate. By the Second World War, 95 percent of Los Angeles housing was off-limits to blacks and Asians. Minorities who had served in World War II or worked in L.A.’s defense industries returned to face increasing patterns of discrimination in housing. More and more, they found themselves excluded from the suburbs and restricted to housing in East or South Los Angeles, Watts, and Compton. Such real-estate practices severely restricted educational and economic opportunities.

Many communities in Los Angeles have changed their ethnic character over time. For many decades, the population was predominantly white and mostly American-born until the late 20th Century. South L.A. was mostly white until the 1950s, but then became predominantly black until the 1990s, and is now mainly Latino. While the Latino community within the City of Los Angeles was once centered on the Eastside, it now extends throughout the city.

Cities: Los Angeles

All Photos © A.J. Guzman
2013

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strikeslip

Selected Works
Earthquakes and Tree Roots

Photographic Recorded Stroll between Matteson Avenue and Palms Boulevard.

A record earthquake occured and seems to be part of an accerating trend: LOS ANGELES (CBS) Four large earthquakes struck around the Pacific Rim Wednesday with one setting a record, as the most powerful strike-slip quake ever recorded. (Cluster Of Large Quakes Serve As Reminder For Preparedness).

Tree roots have uplifted many city sidewalks across L.A., turning a quick walk around the neighborhood into a treacherous experience. According to The Los Angeles Times, the city receives about 2,500 claims a year from people who hurt themselves on these cracks.

Cities: Los Angeles

All Photos © A.J. Guzman
2013

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Illuminations

selected works

In early years of my artist practice Patti Smith Albums Horses and Easter has influenced my work, Illuminations is an ode to Rimbaud, Illuminations poems. The poems admired by Patti Smith consist of a series of theatrical tableaux in which Rimbaud creates a primitive fantasy world an imaginary universe complete with its own mythology, its own quasi-divine beings, its own cities–all depicted in kaleidoscopic images that have the vividness of hallucinations.

Cities: Paris – GF Workstation Studio II (Putten, NL)

All Photos © A.J. Guzman
2012

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Psychogeographic Mappings

selected mappings

Guy Debord and the Situationists were pioneers of the interaction with the urban environment, using the mapping to reveal the subtle and psychic flows of the city. Guy Debord wrote in 1958. “From the point of view, cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.”

The following are sculptural maps made of GPS routes, new piers and navigation’s sketches replicated from maps that are related to Los Angeles students routes and districs. The maps are a Data Visualization of their city districs. Data visualization is the study of the visual representation of data, meaning “information that has been abstracted in some schematic form, including attributes or variables for the units of information.

The Project focuses on different representations of the urban landscape, which shows an overview of different cities as a living organism. Psychogeographic Mappings investigates the urban identity and the social interaction between different groups in the city; the first part of the project provides a cultural analysis of the spatial mobility and mapping of Los Angeles and Amsterdam, the project is in constant transformation. Psychogeographic Mappings examines the psychological and socio-cultural social landscape.

All works  © A.J. Guzman
Los Angeles 2013

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Botanic Tropicalia

selected works

From the summer of 1964 to the mid 70′s my aunt in Panama received letters from a pen pal in Madrid, she answered with her best words describing the Isthmus of Panama, 45 years later in the summer of 2012 I asked her to read the letters to me, based on her diary descriptions of Panama, we made this series using new and old material from my photographic archive, some of the works has never been published before. The photos appear to strive for a sense of universality rather than connection to a particular place, but they still remain an evaluation of the aesthetics of tropical Panama.

Cities: Panama – Cope – Aguadulce – Chiriqui – Tigre

All Photos © A.J. Guzman
2002 – 2012

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Piertopolis Visual diary

Work in Progress

The Piertopolis Visual diary constitute a record of my journeys to spaces that are related to my DNA ancestry and my own existence. The series has been Inspired by the documentary the Powers of Ten and by the book Cosmic View (1957) from the Dutch writer Kees Boeke, which presents a seminal view of the universe, from the galactic to the microscopic scale.

The images takes us on an adventure in magnitudes, we see piers, mountains and cities from Google earth perspective, images taken from people in different piers around the globe, microscopic images of water and sand taken with a microscope and finally the outer edges of the universe, courtesy of the NASA database.

Cities: Amsterdam – Murud Janjira – Dakar – Coney Island – Bocas del Toro – Bodø

Project Piertopolis.com

All Photos © A.J. Guzman
2012

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