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Impenetrable Labyrinths
Impenetrable Labyrinths recalls successive waves of conquistadors, surveyors, and photographers who have all laid claim to the so-called "virgin" landscape of the American West. Many generations of migrants have followed alongside, courted by the promise of prosperity and freedom. The roads through steep and arid canyons and gorges mirror these journeys in search of an American Dream. The land, and its promise, are awesome; but, the path is harrowing. Assembled from multiple views of single canyons and gorges, the resulting relief sculptures tear apart and rebuild the landscape revealing seemingly impenetrable labyrinths of earth and stone. -
Involuntary Landscapes
Involuntary Landscapes interprets artist my attempts to piece together a historical and cultural consciousness lost when my family emigrated from Portugal and settled in California. The children of migrants, like myself, are often expected to function in two cultures without their parents’ memories and birth connection to their home countries and without much guidance in adapting to a new country and culture. Instead, they often piece together knowledge about both cultures from stories, media, travel and by basic trial and error.
Reflecting this phenomenon, the photos of an anonymous family in pre-revolutionary Portugal recall the characters and settings of my own family's stories and evoke recollections of the past without conscious effort--involuntary memories. I juxtapose these with deliberately crafted landscape photos from my travels in the California chaparral and the Portuguese montado. In so doing, the present and past serve as lenses through which the other is interpreted.
I fuse the photographs using a montage process reminiscent of 19th century landscape photographers who combined unrelated photos of land and sky to create harmonious compositions not achievable in a single exposure. The images presented here distill 14,664 compositions to just a few evocative examples. The technique reflects the trials and errors of learning to navigate two cultures without much guidance, but ultimately learning to feel at home in a blend of both.
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Dog Days on the Chaparral
From childhood, one imagines, these landscapes are cut, like those boxes to which perfectly sized shoes never return, relegating the three-dimensional cardboard-walled containers and their covers to school projects. The dioramas built into those boxes with paper and glue asked to be taken for real. Just as real as Hugo Teixeira’s Dog Days of Chaparral stands tall before me. I am taken in by the playful seriousness of what I encounter, even in its appearance in the installation image. Maybe the inspiration arose from biology class, how we dissected frogs, or from the study of contour maps, or from those Hollywood Westerns facades with barroom doors swinging into nothing on the other side. From wherever the idea derived, the piece (part of a series) contains a fresh boldness, almost bravado, in the way it ascends to the sky, echoing the experientiality of mountainous terrains beautifully. We go up and we come down only to climb higher still. Hugo Teixeira, constructs a new way to consider the essence of a landscape, transforming it into stage scenery props, perhaps to say soon enough that may be the only way to preserve what it once looked like. Amidst the sculptural structure (the clamps evoking its impermanence) I can see the horizonless, two- dimensional Sonoran deserts of Arizona flattened in the 1940s by Frederick Sommer, the foothills of Italy stacked upon each other through the telephoto lenses of Mario Giacomelli a decade later, or the string-tied Bermuda triangle (1975) on a beach from the late John Pfahl as much as the time-specific images by Watkins, Weston, and Adams floating in the panoramas of Mark Klett (2000+). To these visions Hugo Teixeira’s approach to the landscape offers exciting new possibilities to stretch the genre yet again, expressing the magnificence and plight of the planet upon which we all live. (© Arno Rafael Minkkinen, 2020)- HTeixeira_Chaparral_A-8027
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Hand-me-down Heart
My first electrocardiogram forced me to confront the latent knowledge that heart disease runs in my family. Having lost my father a year earlier from complications due to heart disease, I felt as if the leads and and electrodes of the electrocardiograph enveloped and constricted me, forcing me to confront my genetic fate. This series of self-portraits, of delicate collodion emulsion on glass and aluminum, is a meditation on that fate and seeks to capture that moment of morbid epiphany and the feeling of absolute fragility which accompanied that realization. -
Towering Webs
Taipa Village Art Space is honoured to invite Luso-American photographic artist Hugo Teixeirato showcase his unique collection of documentary photography featuring an iconographic Macau fixture – bamboo scaffolding on construction sites, which is ubiquitous in the city as it undergoes rapid development. The construction workers (bamboo masters) are acting like spiders, taking a risky job with courage to wrap the vertiginous towers with bamboo scaffoldings which look like spider webs. (Cyanotypes exhibited at Taipa Village Art Space, 2017.) -
Press
A collection of newspaper and magazine clippings and screen grabs featuring press coverage of my artwork.