Three Miles Per Hour
TWO-MAN show featuring
Pinky Urmaza & Koki Lxx
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When I think of Walking, I Look at the Ground
“Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world.” – Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust
Throughout the pandemic (which is now technically over) visual artists Pinky Ibarra Urmaza and Koki Lxx, maintained conversations online about their fondness for books, found objects, and other random things – including, but not limited to: updates on Dead Horse Bay, art-hopping from either hemisphere of the globe, out-of-the-way bookshops and the obscure books they carry, and many more. When things opened up a bit and people were able to resume travel, especially those that had been cancelled due to the pandemic, they discovered something in common they liked doing even during travels: walking. From this came forth an agreement: to continue walking wherever they ended up, and to make an exhibition that goes three miles per hour.
Urmaza takes her cue from mazes and labyrinths, some of the most extreme walking places one can ever go. As with her collage work, these challenges evoke some kind of journey. In walking as with collage, one adjusts to unexpected factors (like Wrong Turns and Dead Ends), and works around unplanned results (think Shortcuts and Alleyways).
Given the inherent complexity in mazes or labyrinths, she cherishes that moment that she loses herself in the process, turning that difficulty in finding one’s way into the solution itself, something that can perhaps be seen in “Piranesi’s Halls.” Walking in daily life, on the other hand, allows a slightly different albeit still labyrinthine experience, where she gets opportunities to overhear stories and conversations that become part of that moment (maybe A Stroll on Fleets Cove). In her arsenal of book covers and parts, found objects, vintage paper, as well as her own markings, the resulting works are both a simulacra and an end-product of her walks.
Lxx, on the other hand, fixates on a habit that many artists seem to have, which is noticing random objects out of the corner of their eye while walking. He himself does this to a point that he decides to walk away a certain distance before reconsidering walking back to pick up a shard of wood, a piece of crumpled paper, rusty wires, or whatever it was that called out to him. In “Collages” he presents porcelain objects that evoke random shapes and forms that one might find on the ground – arranged in a manner echoing Urmaza’s “Desire Paths.” Meanwhile “Lost and Found” presents a series of objects that he and Urmaza had seen during walks, done in porcelain. As they are usually things that have no value nor use, the act of creating (or re-creating) the objects in porcelain is a means to communicate the value that they extend to the artist, as if a clue left behind in a labyrinth for one to find their way back out.
Together, Urmaza and Lxx collaborated on a video work, walking in various locations across the globe. By combining the action of walking, a shared history is created – a sort of non-linear road. In her book “Wanderlust,” which the two read and used as a guide for this exhibition, Solnit expresses: “Roads are a record of those who have gone before, and to follow them is to follow people who are no longer there.” Similar to the path of an artist, leaving records of the times through their work, we can only walk as far as our bodies can take us, but our minds can leave paths for unknown futures to get lost in.
