Artmedia Gallery is proud to present the exhibition NCTx13 Sample. Photographs & Music by Muu Blanco, which gathers thirteen pictures and a soundtrack with music produced by the artist.

Related to contemporary sample culture, Muu Blanco has performed for many years as a deejay and sampling composer in his native Venezuela. From the last year, he has participated in the New York and Miami music scenes.

Simultaneously, he has made a diverse and extended body of work in visual arts, mainly in photography. Interested in altering and breaking the illusionary vision of photography as a realistic representation, Blanco frequently uses the sample or the fragment as the primary material for a new picture and a new meaning. His current work favors the technique of photomontage or the direct intervention, with different procedures, of images belonging to visual archive.

For his series in the exhibition, he intervened a book considered as a classic of socially concerned photography in Venezuela, Retromundo, published in Caracas in 1986. With photographs by Paolo Gasparini and design by Álvaro Sotillo in collaboration with Carlos Rodríguez, this book is still a sophisticated visual dissertation about the loss of meaning of images in contemporary culture. Blanco took the book and several bottles of his prescribed medications and re-photographed details of images putting on them some pills in different positions in each picture.

Blanco’s strategy produces a set of new images refreshed by an insolent and sarcastic air that also functions as a political statement. In his pictures, he shows up the mechanisms according to which photographs are constructed as comments on the world and conducts this idea to its extreme consequences.

About the artist

Muu Blanco is a Venezuelan visual artist and deejay currently based in Miami. He has participated in many group exhibitions in Venezuela and abroad. Recently, he has exhibited individually in Caracas, New York, and Miami. His work has been included in institutional collections as well as in numerous private collections in Latin America and the United States.

About the curator

José Antonio Navarrete has developed an extensive international career as a curator, researcher, and critic of visual arts and culture. His lengthy bibliography focuses on topics of modern and contemporary art, with emphasis on how media technology has affected and transformed art practices. As an artist, he presented his first solo exhibition, What images can do, at ArtMedia Gallery.

About the gallery

Artmedia Gallery was founded in 2012. With a location in Wynwood Art District, Miami, Florida, the gallery has the mission of exhibiting and promoting contemporary art. One of the gallery’s central objectives is to explore the vast possibilities of the expanded notion of art through media technology, with photography and video as its core interest.