Palpitations – an Exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Art

In the video

This is a full transcript of our video. Watch on YouTube.

Bob Pincus: Hi, I’m Bob and this is Art with Bob Pincus. Ah, the San Diego Museum of Art.

It’s a place I’ve spent a lot of time over the years, written about a lot of exhibitions here. Today, we’re focusing on an exhibition called Palpitations, which is a show of the paintings of Marianela de la Hoz, which is a San Diego artist.

Marianela de la Hoz: Every work of art will be a completely different work of art for each of the people that sees that.

Bob: The sound part of the show is provided by Marc Urselli, who’s a very well-known sound engineer.

Marc Urselli: Contemporary art is truly my, my passion. It is truly what I like the most.

Bob: Most dictionary definitions of palpitations talk about the idea of a heart racing or pounding. And the connotation of that is kind of a heightened sense of awareness of things around you. And I think the exhibition tries to give you sort of a heightened sense of both life and the life cycle through paintings and a sound environment. 

Marc: You know, there’s the little cat or the little bird in this one painting, but then the painting is part of a trilogy and then that trilogy is part of a room with 12 paintings, six of which have sound.

Marianela: It begins exactly with life, the baby crying. 

Bob: Right. 

Marianela: The little cat. Of course, that, my cats they say, “Meow, meow.”  Okay. And then suddenly it moves to the world that it’s so complicated. The sounds of the city, of the birds. And then this baby lives his life or her life and goes to the other part when he dies. And then you can- 

Bob: You hear the code blue. 

Marianela: Yeah. What would be the object or the media or whatever that can bring us together? So we thought about the sound cones because of course I could paint the sound cones. One of the things that the sound cones are made of is paper.

Marc: This was a prototype she sent me. Just, it’s a broken speaker, but she was just experimenting. But this is how it started. I looked at that and it was the inspiration. 

Bob: When you go into this gallery, it’s quite dark, but the paintings are all very spotlit. In the middle of the room there are three speakers set up on a kind of a pedestal, and these three go together. If you take that as the kind of thematic organizer in your head, the sounds of the show will start to make a lot of sense too.

Bob: You have the tree of life imagery with all the skeletons and various birds on the tree. But then if you look at the sides, there is a skeleton in a pale image on one side and a baby on the other side. Her paintings had to change for her to do them this way, and yet they seem as seamless as her earlier work.

Marianela: My main theme has always been the duality. So life and death, good and bad, war and peace. There is always this pulse because everything alive has a pulse, the world, the universe, everything. So we say, well, maybe a heart.

Bob: You’ll start seeing that, for example, not only do you get the tree of life and death in the paintings, those beautifully detailed paintings in the middle of the room, then you go off to the side and you start looking at things on the walls. For example, Ouroboros, which is an ancient symbol of a serpent, which is about the idea of the cyclical nature of life, death, and renewal.

Marc: Marianela painted the snake and I then put sand. We, you know, experimented with a lot of materials. We used a kind of ceramic powder and then we excite the speaker by sending some very low frequencies that have different, change over time. And with these frequencies, I can make the sound move and create images and shakes and even defy gravity. It’s literally going up. You know, up up! And you have to find the exact relationship between frequency and volume, and that relationship changes all the time. And the amazing thing is that unless you press that button for more than 15 minutes, you will never see the same form twice. And in fact, even after that you will never see the same form twice.

Marianela: There’s something there that relates to them. Some get angry, some cry, others laugh, but it’s not the kind of work that you pass by and say, “Ah, look, this is very beautiful.” Or this is, no.

Bob: No, that’s true.

Marianela: They stay and go inside the painting and they really react with thoughts and feelings. And she said maybe that’s why people in a museum love your work, because of that.

Bob: This painting, War, I was never able to domesticate you. It really shows the accessibility of her work because it’s so finely detailed and yet it’s so symbolic. So for example, in that painting you see a partial image of a woman and she’s holding up the map of the world and then you see the blood dripping down. So she’s trying to come to terms with the idea that feels part of that world and yet feels like the world is not at peace in any way that she would wish and hope it would be.

Bob: And this kind of deep idea of the allegorical with the highly realistic details is, I think, distinguishes her paintings and makes them very accessible, but also you feel like they’re communicating with you. And you have to get up really close to the paintings because they are fairly small. When you get up very close to them, you feel like they’re kind of speaking to you about the symbolism in the paintings.

Marc: It transcends borders and times. And that is what I found so fascinating.

[Salvador] Dali is one of my favorite painters and I can see a little bit of Dali in Marianela’s work. Of course, I can also see the huge Mexican tradition that Marianela is drawing upon and, and coming from. But all of those things are intertwined in her work and I love that.

Marianela: I did a tour with the docents and I explained everything.

Bob: I bet they loved that.

Marianela: Oh yes, I told the story with the images and then I asked them to close their eyes and listen to the same story just with the sounds. They closed their eyes and some of them were crying. So yes, it was… for me that was the best. The reward.

Marc: We need to thank the San Diego Museum of Art, and the curator Anita Feldman for believing in us and giving us this show and really allowing this collaboration to be seen and be known. And we’re very grateful for that. I know Marianela is as well.

Bob: Thanks for watching this episode. I like to draw your attention to the fact that we’ve done interviews with both of the artists, Marc Urselli and Marianela de la Hoz. So please watch those also. And please remember to subscribe. Thanks.

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