Main road through White Sands National Monument in New Mexico - Stratosphere + MTAA, 2009/2015

Torched & Scorched
Ana Busto, Yifan Hu, MTAA, Raphaele Shirley

May 15 to June 21, 2015
Opening of Exhibition: Friday May 22 from 6-9 pm
Viewing hours: Thursday 5-7 pm, Friday 2-7 pm, Saturday–Sunday 12-6 pm
Torched & Scorched performance with Yifan Hu, MTAA and Raphaele Shirley, Saturday June 6, 5-6 pm


Ventana 244 presents Torched & Scorched a multi-media installation assembled with interactive and traditional formats including painting, sculpture and sound.

Drive away from Brooklyn, past the skyscrapers of Manhattan, past the swamps, factories, farms and parking lots of New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the highways and suburbs of Virginia, over into Tennessee, crossing the Mississippi via Memphis into Arkansas, and then cross the flats of Oklahoma going on to the expanses of West Texas. If you travel this far, the sky opens up. You see the sun and moon beat down on the earth with punishing, bright light. Keep going west, and you find yourself in the mountain-ringed Tularosa Basin among the gypsum crystal dunes of the White Sands National Monument of New Mexico. This landscape is where our age, the nuclear age and natural history commingled in a flash.

Two thousand miles east in Brooklyn, Ventana 244 presents Torched & Scorched opening on May 15 featuring a collaboration by Ana Busto, Yifan Hu, MTAA and Raphaele Shirley. Torched & Scorched integrates a visual and audio environment with conversations about the emotional weight of the landscape that today is a tourist attraction open to the public twice a year; a place where, for a few dollars, people can buy a chunk of irradiated earth that was melted to glass by the blasts of 60 years ago.

Using combustion as a primary working process, Ana Busto approaches core materials of iron, clay, bronze, wood, sand, glass, cardboard and stone as theaters for transformation. For Torched & Scorched she presents elements of a down-on-the-heels park: landscapes painted, cast glass, and ceramic and wood. In Busto’s work, stones look like animals or animals turned to stone. Shapes appear and speak from electronic driven voices.

With Busto’s sculpture as a starting point, Yifan Hu, mixes found and computer processed animal voices to create an audio landscape for Torched & Scorched As the voices cross, overlap and diverge, the boundaries between the identifiability and nonidentifiability come in and out of focus.

For Torched & Scorched, Raphaele Shirley built the fourth of recent series of large scale paint and neon installations. This new orb shaped work, blistering white light and golden skin is set in a dark expanse. In this series Shirley merges differing representations of cosmology generated throughout the ages in both Eastern and Western traditions filtered through the language of post minimal and process based art.

In a set of works titled New Mexico Setlist, MTAA overlays a second exhibition onto the gallery space. Made of text routed onto vinyl backgrounds, MTAA names artist and artworks intertwined with the New Mexico landscape. Combined, the six small works of the New Mexico Setlist create an art historical mixed tape for our wandering through the West as well as provides some background and mind-eye context for the Torch / Scorch installation. permanent link to this post

In Preparation for The Disappearance of MTAA, 2015
Two black felt hats painted black inside hung by a thread
$600, edition of 1 of 2

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First In Space - 2015
set of four 6”x 8” machine etched black vinyl with white core signs 100 usd each. no edition.







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