When most people think of Latin American art, big cities like Buenos Aires and Mexico City come to mind. An exhibit currently on exhibit at the Santa Monica Museum of Art features 50 works by 20 contemporary artists from the art center of Tijuana, Mexico. The border city popularly known more for its pharmacies and night clubs than for its visual arts, is full of experimental visual artists.

Maps and scale models play a prominent role, allowing artists to move freely between their imaginations and reality. Photo-collages and dioramas by Guatemala-born architect and urban planner Teddy Cruz suggest a flexible future in which recycled things increasingly meet the needs of a growing population. A more ominous future is evoked by the surveillance-style video projected onto a topographic model of the border region by Torolab, an artist collective founded by Raúl Cárdenas-Osuna in 1995. “The Region of the Transborder Trousers” uses humor and GPS technology, sewn into the pants of five participants, to track their movements over five days in 2004.

Marcos Ramírez ERRE’s pint-size model of “Toy an Horse” recalls the towering, two-headed wooden horse he installed astride the border in 1997. His miniature billboard, part of a project with social historian Mike Davis, stands in for an actual billboard on Interstate 5. Both make viewers think twice about what it means to be a man and just where vigilance fits into identity.

Sounds and looks like a great exhibit.

Strange New World: Art and Design From Tijuana can be seen now through April 7th.

Via / The LA Times