Pia Camil

Mexican artist Pia Camil looks for spaces. Or, as she describes it, “the blind spots of this mass culture where the eye could actually rest.” The little dog laughed features hand-dyed canvas panels that reference the vertical billboards found in Mexican urban landscapes. Here the panels suggest what could be interpreted as “spaces” of a whole-the hand-stitched pieces as part of a larger image. Each colorful segment allows the viewer a moment of pause, though collectively the segments form a collage of commodity culture, a commentary on mass consumerism and capitalistic overuse.

-Zoë Pulley, RISD MFA 2023, Graphic Design

The curtain works are abstractions from billboards. In Mexico, the urban landscape has been taken over by billboards and they have become totally integrated into the landscape. For me, it was very important to begin to document and start noting where there were spaces-I call them the blind spots of this mass culture where the eye could actually rest. I began to get more involved and interested in them. I like the sense of overuse and reuse of the panels of the billboards. I have spoken to other people in different countries and it seems only in Mexico are they built this way in a vertical panel fashion, where they get reshuffled and recycled.

I wanted this curtain to work as a screen, wherever you were positioned it wasn’t this flat thing on the wall but it would block the space, you could be either inside or outside the curtain. -Pia Camil