Pia Camil: Lover's Rainbow (2019)

Pia Camil was born in Mexico City. She holds a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London. She returned to Mexico City in 2009 where she formed a band with Esteban and Ana Jose Aldrete and began designing sets and costumes to enhance their performances. In the years that followed she incorporated sculptural elements into her paintings and began to embrace the inclusion of mass-produced apparel such as t-shirts and blue jeans for sculptural installations. Her work is included in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Centre Pompidou and the Blanton.

With Lover’s Rainbow, Camil took a leap forward in her sculptural installations. Originally created for Desert X, 2019, Camil, while still embracing mass production as the source of her media, moved on from the soft, forgiving and even playful sculptures she had formed from textiles, to using the strong, forceful yet pliant industrial resource, rebar. Rebar was chosen because, as Desert X’s website explains, Exposed rebar usually signals development, but too often in the Mexican landscape we see those dreams thwarted and abandoned. The piece was conceived as an identical set of rainbows (because) historically, rainbows have symbolized rain and fertility. While the act of bending the rebar into the ground (in desert territory) is a way to reinsert hope into the land. Additionally, according to Camil’s website, the mirror rainbows are meant to throw light into the current immigration policies, prompting viewers to see things from two perspectives. Emphasis on the entire color spectrum with the invocation of the rainbow earns this installation a place in A Splash of Local Color.

(This piece is proposed for inclusion in A Splash of Local Color: Vibrant Hues at Work in Contemporary Indigenous Art.)

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