Press Release: Chuck Ramirez

01.02.99

In The Hudson (Show)Room

Chuck Ramirez

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS

Exhibition: January 14 pril 4, 1999

ArtPace, A Foundation for Contemporary Art | San Antonio is pleased to present new
digital photographic works by San Antonio artist Chuck Ramirez in The Hudson
(Show)Room.

Chuck Ramirez was born in 1962 in San Antonio, TX where he continues to live and
work. With a background in graphic design, Ramirez balances careers in the commercial
and fine arts. Since the mid-1990s, Ramirez has shown in a range of venues in Texas,
including San Antonio's Sala Diaz, San Angel, Blue Star Art Space and House Space. He
was included in UTSA's Synthesis and Subversion-A Latino Direction in San Antonio
Art, Boy's Toys at the Arlington Museum of Art, Revelations at the Dallas Visual Art
Center and Tres Proyectos Latinos: Memory Frames at the Austin Museum of Art.

As an artist who is also a graphic designer, Ramirez processes and deconstructs the
media world in which he lives. His work employs visual and conceptual techniques that
are found in contemporary advertising and package design. Using typography and digital
imaging technology, Ramirez isolates and recontextualizes familiar objects and texts to
explore issues that are both personal and socio-political, always with a witty sense of
humor. Earlier work has investigated the complexity of Latino identity and visibility,
queer politics and the AIDS crisis.

Ramirez's work is particularly effective in its synthesis of personal history and
narrative with pressing social issues. Drawing from personal and popular imagery?
grandmother's kitchen, his artist friends, and Brady Bunch graphics?uses the familiar
to explore how social issues impact his individual life. His formal devices are
contemporary in style?ering a reading of the dominance of media imagery and
advertising? graphic in their isolation of images, assemblage of objects and use of
bold colors.

Since the AIDS crisis began over fifteen years ago, artists have responded
overwhelmingly to this disease. The graphic activist works of the collective Gran Fury,
the narrative assemblages of David Wojnarowicz and the meditative installations of Felix
Gonzalez-Torres have placed AIDS into a cultural and visual context. At ArtPace,
Ramirez continues this trajectory of art history in an installation of digitally enhanced
photographic works, entitled Long Term Survivor. The individual pieces explore
the rituals of sustaining life and desire in the context of the AIDS crisis. Images range
from abstractions of erotic toys to day-of-the-week pill boxes to leather chaps. Ramirez
also presents a video piece on three monitors that display a spinning chrome ring? seductive form that recalls corporate logos?inst a bright red wall. Working with
materials and images that are part of his daily life?ife impacted by the AIDS
crisis?irez transforms the language and power of advertising into a call for action
and compassion, expression and self-actualization.

445 North Main Avenue San Antonio TX 78205 t 210 212 4900 f 210 212 4990 www.artpace.org