Carla Rippey, a hunter of meaning in a world bombarded by images

▲ Artist Carla Rippey presents her exhibition , *The Intercepted Image *, at the Museo Universitario del Chopo. Photo by Marco Peláez.

Merry MacMasters

La Jornada Newspaper, Saturday, August 2, 2025, p. 3

A hunter of images, the artist Carla Rippey recognizes in her way of working the influence of a particular book, The Family of Man , which she kept looking at as a child and in which images are juxtaposed and accompanied by some literary text to give it another face of meaning .

At one point, Rippey rescued that copy of the book from his family home in Kansas City. It's now included in The Intercepted Image, an exhibition of his most recent work, opening today at the Museo Universitario del Chopo.

The 120 pieces on display include graphite and color drawings, prints, modified photography, collage , artist books, transparencies, sculpture, and ceramics.

The artist had not exhibited in Mexico City since 2016, when the Carrillo Gil Art Museum organized the retrospective Resguardo y resistencia , with work from four decades beginning in 1976.

The daughter of a photojournalist and a mother devoted to literature, Rippey grew up immersed in images. She connects her own interest to what she saw in the outside world, as well as books and magazines: “The printed image is very much in the tradition of collage and scrapbooks. There are artists who descend not so much from academia, but from the tradition of interacting with the printed world. Today it would be the virtual world, too. And, from there, invent their images.”

Recycling of works

Rippey arrived in Mexico in 1973 after studying in Paris and New York and learning metal engraving at a couple of university workshops in Chile: "I started drawing and making prints based on photographs in the late 1970s and 1980s. It was the era of neofigurativism. People told me I was copying photos. Then came the art of appropriation (the use of pre-existing objects or images), cultivated by artists like the American painter David Salle ."

Recycling works “began to be done a lot in the developing world in the 1980s. Suddenly, it turned out that what I was doing intuitively, when it wasn't well-regarded, was postmodernism. It often consisted of commenting on the photos. For example, I worked a lot with erotic photography in the 1980s, although most of the time it was a kind of critique of the image, or what changed and identified the woman. The art critic Oliver Debroise said I perverted them. Basically, I put the photo in a different position than its original intention. That way, I gave it other layers of meaning and intention.”

Graphic design suited her well because it was more procedural ; also, "since I only went to art school for a few months to learn printmaking, I had no training as a painter. I could continue making collages or drawing as I had all my life." She did printmaking in the collective workshop Molino de Santo Domingo. At first , I had a long period where I didn't work with figures, but rather with flowers and plants because I didn't know where I wanted to go . Upon discovering her path, I began to recreate women from complex cultures, like the indigenous women who work as maids in Mexico City .

He resumes: At first, I would take plants, put them on the engraving plate, and make a design with them or invent something from my head, without a photographic image. Then, I realized that I found it more satisfying to base them on an image I had found. That's how I started making archives. Many were like old photo albums or Victorian erotic image books. I grabbed whatever resonated with me from everywhere .

Incorporating digital

Then, with the invention of laser photocopying, I was able to expand my images much further in artist's books, supported by transfers. Around 2000, I began working with a computer; even everything I do now goes through Photoshop to frame, manage color, or get the right images for the photocopier or for what I'm going to draw. Also in that year, I started downloading images from the internet. That's how I found the work I'm exhibiting, of radiographs of hands destroyed by rockets .

Appropriation isn't new in art; however, for Rippey, what has changed is the ease of reproduction. In fact, many young artists don't bother drawing because it's easier to handle images. There are fair use laws, where it's permissible to use other people's images if there's a change in meaning. You can integrate it into your own concept or as part of another image. In general, it's no longer criminalized .

The exhibitor always tries to mention where she took her images. For example, in her piece about war-destroyed houses, she tried to include the photographer's name. Sometimes I've been able to communicate with them. Nelson Morales let me use one of his images. I have enormous respect for photographers and the work they do .

In a world saturated with images, what Rippey does in a certain way is my way of making that bombardment coherent for me .

According to Tania Ragasol, the exhibition's curator, Carla had been associated with the world of graphic art and drawing; however, she also does sculpture, ceramics, and installation work. Her work is always informed by deep research and reflection, whether on a personal or global level .

Carla Rippey : The Intercepted Image opens today at 12 noon, and there will be a discussion at 1 p.m. at the Museo Universitario del Chopo, located at Dr. Enrique González Martínez 10, in the Santa María la Ribera neighborhood. Admission is free.

▲ From left to right: Stefanie Weiss, Julieta Egurrola, Luis and Marina de Tavira, and Gabriel Pascual, during the presentation. Photo by Roberto García Ortiz

Daniel López Aguilar

La Jornada Newspaper, Saturday, August 2, 2025, p. 4

Luis de Tavira needed only one phrase to condense the spirit of his book and of a lifetime dedicated to the performing arts: I love, but I want to love more .

Amid praise, memories, and a room filled with affection, last night at the El Milagro Theater he presented the new edition of The Invisible Spectacle : Paradoxes on the Art of Acting, a volume of aphorisms published by Ediciones El Milagro.

The director, essayist, and educator, whose career spans generations of Mexican theater, spoke in a calm and intimate tone. He stated that his greatest privilege has been to be a spectator.

“I’ve spent my life amazed at the way actors create an artistic reality… in art, there are only two real things: the artist and the work.” In acting, he added, the two merge: the actress is the work, and the character makes her the actress .

Before a crowded audience of young people and adults, despite the rain that hadn't stopped since the afternoon, the author explained that this publication is not a simple reprint. "This copy also belongs to those who made it a reality: Julieta Egurrola, Marina de Tavira, and Stefanie Weiss, present tonight. We wrote it together. It was created by the actors I've worked with."

Ultimately, that's what theater is: encounter. Gathering together here and now, in this community that continues to dream together.

Weiss, an editor and actress, recalled that the first edition appeared in 1999 and the second in 2003. “This third edition preserves the previous legacy and adds prologues by Juan Antonio Hormigón and Luis Mario Moncada.

“There are 365 aphorisms – one for each day – that invite you to lose yourself in thought, to open invisible doors.”

Gabriel Pascal, the event's moderator, emphasized the merit of this edition's emergence without institutional support. It was realized with the essentials: complicity, tenacity, and a profound love for theater .

Marina de Tavira expressed her closeness to the text: "It's been on my desk for 25 years. In the antechamber of each character, in the rehearsal room, in the hallways, in my notebooks. Always changing, always the same ." She indicated that "The Invisible Spectacle… transcends the realm of acting; it's a guide to the mystery of existence ."

He also emphasized the pedagogy of the stage creator as dynamic thinking: "Each aphorism is a spark, a compass. It whispers to me: 'You have my ears, I am your labyrinth.'" He also reflected on the present: "Today, when the media pushes us to become a spectacle of ourselves, this work regains urgency ."

Julieta Egurrola was brief and emotional. She recalled meeting De Tavira when she was still in high school. However, those words she couldn't express after each performance are still there. They're ours .

He then invited the audience to read aloud their favorite aphorisms. The response was immediate: actors, alumni, and students—many trained by the stage designer—celebrated with eloquent and poignant passages the art that unites them.

Weiss linked the book's ideas to current contexts: Luis argues that a nation conceives of itself through its theater. I'm thinking of the Zapatista territories, where theater is a form of memory and of projecting a desired horizon .

Luis de Tavira confessed that this volume was inspired by a medieval literary piece that has accompanied him throughout his life: The Book of the Beloved and Love , by Raimundo Lullio.

“There are 365 brief dialogues between the lover and the love. The opening sequence shows the lover asking what he should do that day. Love replies: 'Love.' The lover replies: 'I already love.' And the love concludes: 'Love more.' That fragment encapsulates the heart of my work and the meaning of this shared evening.

Theater unites us and creates community. It calls us to find ourselves here and now, to discover what we share and build that bond. These reflections are born from a passionate love for art and for those who make it possible, because what we call invisible spectacle is, at its core, the materialization of a love that always desires to grow.

La Jornada Newspaper, Saturday, August 2, 2025, p. 4

The new edition of The Invisible Spectacle: Paradoxes of the Art of Acting (Ediciones El Milagro), by Luis de Tavira, explores fear, fiction, identity, youth, talent, and the fragility of those who expose themselves in front of others, but also time, vision, memory, and thought as theatrical acts.

Some aphorisms included in the copy are:

This book is written to be read slowly, because it arrives late to a hurried time in which thought has been banished from that action that has wanted to be the art of action .

Theater requires many years to become young. That art of the youthful mask that unmasks the imposture of adult life, that other mask, now expressionless, now impenetrable, only equal to itself: the bitter experience of everything lived .

Opening things up to make room for the world is the power of fiction .

▲ Effigy Vase II , oil. 2023. Photo courtesy of the artist .

Merry MacMasters

La Jornada Newspaper, Saturday, August 2, 2025, p. 5

The Espacio Cultural Gallery in Oaxaca City displays the work of painter Demián Flores, which coincided with the opening of the Rufino Tamayo Museum of Pre-Hispanic Art of Mexico in Oaxaca 49 years ago. These works feature 12 lithographs of ancient Mexican idols, alluding to the more than 1,000 archaeological pieces donated by Tamayo.

These lithographs are based on simple drawings of some of the ceramics in the collection, to which Tamayo then applied a colored stain , Demián notes. Many of the vessels housed in the museum have their own unique character . To the extent that the original museography, which is still preserved, emulates Tamayo's paintings, the museum's colorful niches absorb the colors that surround them and, in the process, change the way we look .

Attracted by Tamayo's graphic work, Flores took up "their inspiration to make a somewhat academic, almost archaeological drawing of the same Zapotec effigy vessels, both from the Oaxacan site and the National Museum of Anthropology. Of these funerary urns, one of the most represented and relevant deities within the Zapotec pantheon is Cocijo, the god of lightning, rain, storms, hail, clouds, fog, and dew ." Flores drew in person at both sites.

Cocijo is the title of the series Flores began more than three years ago; part of it is on display at the Espacio Cultural de Oaxaca. It includes 14 oil paintings in various formats, eight prints, and a ceramic piece. At the end of 2023, the artist exhibited some of these works in his solo exhibition , A flor de piel (A flower of skin) , the latest exhibition held by Galería Casa Lamm.

Flores had previously worked on the figure of Chaac, a Mayan version of Cocijo , a piece that engaged in dialogue with a work on the same theme by French artist Orlán, exhibited in 2024 at the Museo de Arte Popular. From there, the Cocijo series originated, which required an almost archaeological work with the drawing of these pieces , many of whose iconographic attributes have to do with the bat, the earth, the sky, the jaguar, and the serpent. When bringing these images together and creating a kind of palimpsest—not all of them are effigy vessels of Cocijo—Flores realized that the combination of these iconographies created new meanings.

Create new signifiers

At that point, he decided to shift the series of drawings toward painting. This led him to consider what I was interested in doing in painting as a contemporary artistic practice . He decided it would involve revisiting painting from its own elements as a meaningful form . He thus displaced these small linear drawings as a form of pictorial structure, and these lines became a motive for considering painting: how the line could determine pictorial space .

According to Flores, Cocijo is his most pictorial series, although if you look at the paintings, they're actually lines that construct the visual field . He was also interested in creating "a kind of antipalimpsest, as if one were dismantling the elements of painting—line, color, space—to arrive at almost essential forms."

Part of the series is also on display in Mexico City, as the graphic pieces were created at the La Imagen del Rinoceronte Workshop in downtown Tlalpan.

Led by printmaker Humberto Valdez, the workshop is open free of charge to young people who work there and learn graphic design. Between 50 and 60 young people attend each day, notes Flores, who created a portfolio of six prints there, the edition of which he donated so the funds raised could support the purchase of materials.

The Cocijo exhibition will remain open until August 15 at the Espacio Cultural de Oaxaca, Crespo 114, Oaxaca City.

From the Editorial Staff

La Jornada Newspaper, Saturday, August 2, 2025, p. 5

Baja California is the guest of honor at the Los Pinos Cultural Center at a celebration taking place today and tomorrow, where the border state will showcase music, dance, storytelling, literature, gastronomy, and a craft exhibition—expressions of the sea, mountains, and desert of the northern part of the country.

The Yuman, made up of five indigenous groups on the Mexican side, will be represented in the flavors of smoked kitchens, as well as in a display of handicrafts, activities that will begin at 10:00 a.m. At the same time, the photography exhibition Jaspuypaim: The Never Baptized will open to the public, capturing the life and death of the mountain Indians.

These indigenous groups have been present for some 4,500 years, making them the only group of prehistoric origin that established contact with European colonizers and that survives to the present. They live in settlements in the municipalities of Ensenada, Tecate, Rosarito, and Mexicali.

Today and tomorrow, Lizeth Marcela will offer representative oral storytelling from Baja California, in addition to leading workshops for children.

Dancer Alejandro Chávez will perform contemporary dance performances with choreography Manuel , while Jesús Bautista will perform the rock-pop concert Me verás subir.

Between 1 and 3 p.m., the Nortestación station will arrive, where books by Baja California writers will be given away. Minerva Velasco will also perform a dramatized reading of Frida Kahlo: Viva la Vida .

On Sunday, at 3:20 p.m., the National School of Folkloric Dance Company will perform the calabaceado dance, which has its roots in livestock farming activities in the north. In 2022, the calabaceado dance was declared Cultural Heritage of Baja California.

The opening of the Baja California cultural festival in Los Pinos in the Plaza de las Jacarandas will be at 11:00 a.m. and will feature Elisa Lemus, director of the Los Pinos Cultural Complex, and Alma Delia Ábrego, Secretary of Culture of Baja California, among other guests.

The activities, featuring 30 artists, chefs, artisans, and cultural promoters, as part of the Mexico in Los Pinos initiative, will take place both days from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., at the space located at Molino del Rey 252, in the first section of Chapultepec Park.

Latin Press

La Jornada Newspaper, Saturday, August 2, 2025, p. 5

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) announced that more than 200 original pieces, including sculptures and artifacts, featuring images of the gods of Ancient Egypt will be exhibited at the institution.

Starting October 12, the Divine Egypt exhibition will explore the spirituality and religious art of this distant, yet attractive and enigmatic civilization.

It will feature spiritual representations of these deities in temples, sanctuaries, and tombs, as well as the instruments that gave them life in daily worship, establishing a connection between the real and divine worlds. The works on display range from monumental statues to small, elegant figurines symbolizing 25 of the major idols of that era, including the falcon-headed god Horus; the lion-headed Sakhmet; and the great creator for the Egyptians, Ra, among others.

The museum's executive director, Max Hollein, noted that the exhibition brings together the finest works on loan from some of the world's leading institutions, including the Fine Arts Museum in Boston, the Louvre in Paris, and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, although more than 140 of those objects belong to the Met itself, he noted.

The gallery highlighted that one of its most significant pieces is a solid gold statue of the god Amun, which will adorn a recreation of a divine barque , a type of vessel that transported the main deity of a temple.

Aiming to examine the ways in which the kings and people of Ancient Egypt recognized and interacted with their gods, each exhibition section will offer an immersive opportunity to provide a window into the thought and spirituality of one of history's most enduring and sophisticated civilizations.

The exhibition highlights the profound sense of continuity and renewal with which the Egyptians addressed the great mysteries of life and death, anchoring their answers in the visual and symbolic richness of their religious art, the Met concluded.