Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Tyin' the knot



My mother likes Mexico a lot so it's not difficult to get her to come down for visits. She principally was visiting to come for the wedding of my cuñada but since she arrived a few days early, we went to Taxco for a quick two days. I've mentioned Taxco in previous posts, but now I have a picture to post.



Well, the family wedding was a few weeks ago and everything was nice and happy and sweet and delicious. It was held at a mansion hotel in Cuernavaca, a small town near Mexico City. There were maybe 150 guests or so and many stayed on to party into the late evening with dancing, karaoke and DJ hits. The then Radiant Bride has returned from her honeymoon in Southeast Asia and seems happy that things have returned to normal and of course is excited to be married yay!

We went to a rather good art show by a Dutch artist who lives in the Centro Historico of DF the other day. His name is Francis Alys and his show is huge, taking up nearly the whole gallery and including drawings, writings, videos, photographs, multimedia, sculpture, and found stuff that all somehow relate to the neighborhood around his studio. There are always lots of good modern art shows to see in Mexico City as well as the more touristy art galleries and museums and much of it is interesting and good. This show seems to be inevitably as much about the life of a foreign artist living in Mexico City as it is about more banal contemporary art ideas - bodies in space, time, intersection, etc... I haven't been to scores of shows, but when making visual art in Mexico City it seems impossible to erase the watermark that the city's uniqueness leaves. Mexico doesn't have the governmental arts funding of fancy places like Canada or France, but it is a net exporter of artists nonetheless and in Mexico City and some other places like Oaxaca, there seem to be strong arts initiatives both publicly and privately funded.