Javier Cambre

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Javier Cambre
Birth name Xavier Evaristo Cambre
Born 1966
San Juan, Puerto Rico
Nationality Spanish, American, Puerto Rican
Field video, photography, drawing, sculpture

Javier Cambre (born Xavier Cambre, 1966, San Juan, Puerto Rico) is a contemporary artist, working in diverse media such as video, photography, drawing, text and sculpture.

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[edit] Studies

After studying architecture at Universidad de Puerto Rico (B. Design) and at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (Dipl. Arquitecto) in Colombia, Cambre obtained the Master of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

[edit] Exhibitions

Cambre has exhibited his work at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, the Sculpture Center, the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and the Moore Space in Miami. He has also exhibited his work in museums in Spain, Puerto Rico, Russia and Argentina. Cambre has been awarded residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA, and at the National Studio Program in P.S. 1/MoMA, as well as artist grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture and the Newark Council on the Arts. His work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum.

With a montage-like mobility and interplaying with architectural modernism, avant-garde cinema and communication graphics, Cambre's videos, photographs, text-based works and sculptures tend to examine the relations between reality and artifice, time and memory, desire and failure, the individual and the city. Curator Elvis Fuentes has written in Art Nexus Magazine: "The video Cerca a la Puerta del Sol explores the tension between documented and fictitious history. Cambre presents the marginal world that exists in central Madrid, steps away from Puerta del Sol. Prostitutes, beggars, gypsies-characters generally assumed to be undesirable for representing society-pose for the camera or are captured in flagrante delicto, as if the artist were a paparazzo and they, his prisoner celebrities... nothing seems to stop the hardship..."

In Cambre's work, the tension between fact and fiction is not exposed in a analytical fashion but rather in a practice approaching a poetical discourse which seems to disrupt temporal, spatial and narrative conventions, by means of framing devices, free associations, jump cuts and non linearity. As expressed by Elaine King in Sculpture Magazine (Jan 2006):" Cambre’s time-based Glass Cinema House deals with film, popular culture, human behavior, memory, and its relationship to architecture. The transparent, rectangular glass container with its severe black pedestal resembles a Minimalist form. It becomes the arena for the artist’s video Paseante (Passerby) to unfold—a solitary female figure wandering aimlessly inside the buildings on the University of Puerto Rico campus, designed by Heinrich Klumb in the 1960's. The juxtaposition of the fixed cube and the interior bluish glow of the looped projection calls to mind T. S. Eliot’s verse from his Burnt Norton: Time present and time past /Are both perhaps present in time future...."

[edit] Videography

  • Monsieur Hyde (2002)
  • Forever Arriving (2003)
  • Contempt (2003)
  • Persona Erasure (2004)
  • Marilyn (Never Got Old) (2004)
  • Paseante (2005)
  • Cerca a la Puerta del Sol (2005)
  • Godzilla (2005)
  • One Plus One (2006)
  • Freight/Fright (2006)
  • Newyear (2007)
  • Feedback Chronicles (2007)

[edit] References