Vigilancia de los dioses / Surveillance of the gods

JO-HS is delighted to present Floria González & Sandra Leal: Vigilancia de los dioses / Surveillance of the gods in collaboration with Projet Moné. Featuring new paintings by Floria and Sandra, Surveillance of the gods is one node in a three-story exhibition of new work by 12 artists at Projet Moné's pop-up space in Condesa for Mexico City’s Art Week, 2024.

Installation views

Intellectual and artistic collaboration has been a tenet of Floria and Sandra's friendship since they met through the music scene in Mexico City in 2003. Within a month, the pair started to work together making photographs for fashion and music publications. This spirit of creative collaboration persisted as both Sandra and Floria developed their painting practices. While Floria paints impressionistic scenes that blend imaginations of the past and future, Sandra works primarily in abstraction. Despite these distinct orientations, the artists continue to share ideas, themes, color palettes, and formal concerns. Sandra and Floria have shared studio space in Mexico City and New York, most recently in the lead up to Floria's debut solo debut solo show in New York in the fall of 2023, and in preparation for Surveillance of the gods.

While Sandra and Floria have developed their practices in conversation with one another for decades, Surveillance of the gods is the first time their work has been exhibited together. The artists were inspired to conceptualize Surveillance of the gods by the recent slate of major exhibitions examining how personal relationships between artists and their oeuvres shape the trajectory of an artist's career and their place in art history. The show invites viewers to recognize affinities between the works, whether formal, energetic, conceptual, or all of the above.

A dialogic excavation of Sandra and Floria's respective practices, Surveillance of the gods is located within a larger group exhibition featuring work by artists in the community cultivated by Projet Moné in Mexico. Featured artists include: Máscaras de Alambre, Sonia Bandura, Brittany Maton / Nin Studio, E'ME, Izack Morales, Makan Negahban, Alexa Perez Rea, Siete Studio, Viridiana. Together, Surveillance of the gods and the extended group show celebrate the relationship between artists and the vital importance of creative community.

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Selected works

Floria González was born in Monterrey on July 20th, 1980. She moved to Acuña Coahuila in 1983, before moving to Mexico City at 16 where she currently lives and works.

Working in photography, video, installation, performance and painting, Floria maintains a constant dialogue between fantasy and imagination, constructing realities that draw on memory, experience, and material cultural references from romantic pastoral scenes in toile de jouy to the AI artist AIDA. Floria harnesses these dynamic constellations of references with a practically synesthetic aptitude for conjuring a sense of fantastical place and time.

She is the creator and director of Floto Studio where she has directed music videos and documentaries for artists such as Leonel García, Natalia Lafurcade, Torreblanca, Kaay, Sofi Mayen, Jazmín Solar, Sabino, Alondra de la Parra and Chula de Clown. She has also collaborated with artists such as Matisse, Francisca Valenzuela, Aleks Syntek, Reik, Kevin Johansen, and Jorge Drexler. She has made concert visuals for Leonel Garcia, Natalia Lafourcade, Carla Morrison and Paty Cantú. Her work has been exhibited in shows in Mexico City, Monterrey, New York, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Berlin, Italy, Hong Kong, London, and Singapore.

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Sandra Leal Treviño was born on 12 April, 1980 in the city of Monterrey in Nuevo León, Mexico. She currently lives and works in Monterrey Mexico, focusing on pictorial and graphic production. She completed a Bachelor of Plastic and Visual Arts at the University of Monterrey between 1998 - 2002, also taking courses at the London Institute (CSM) in London, England.

She later completed a postgraduate degree in Visual Communication at the London University of the Arts (LCC). Examining the feeling and drive that motivates the movement from contemplation and/or visualization to the creative act, her practice explores how to create light and darkness on canvas or paper. She applies, crosses out and erases line, each gesture falling into an accumulation of layers, such that each moves unpredictably from the depths to the surface and vice versa. Her work perverts the darkness of the grounds by recognizing the chromatic significance of the line without delineating between painting, drawing and writing, instead prioritizing the spatial and organizational power of light. She has exhibited collectively and individually in Mexico City, Monterrey, Madrid, Zurich and London.