Chicago Artists Coalition is pleased to present A Cosmetic Decision, a solo show featuring BOLT Resident, Juan Camilo Guzmán.

Guzmán presents an installation of diverse and nonhierarchical rearrangments of images sourced form mass culture and contemporary advertisment. The artist's treatment of them points to a refusal to be fixed in meaning, and instead to set up moments of pleasure with the simple and complex surface manifestations. Now and then, the work alludes to the identity politics and notions of difference present in Latin America. Creating a feedback loop between the formal and social qualities of the collages, A Cosmetic Decision takes an ontological approach to self-reflection, construction of personal identity, and arbitrary aesthetic and political interests.

Artist Talk Tuesday, June 13, 6:00 - 7:30 pm

Juan Camilo Guzmán will engage in a conversation with Terry R. Myers, critic and independent curator (most recently of Candida Alvarez: Here at the Chicago Cultural Center), about the thought process and formation of his solo exhibition, A Cosmetic Decision.

Artist Bio

Juan Camilo Guzmán is interested in shopping. He chooses images from mass culture to talk about politics, art, painting, cultural issues, taste, the material world, pleasure, power, sexuality, gender and the role of the artist’s external life in the larger culture. The media he uses includes products, handmade stuff, video, painting or something done by someone else. He is also able to make jokes without smiling. Guzmán was born in Bogotá, Colombia where he lived until 2014. He received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.