Unrealized Couch proposal and model for Allen Memorial Art Museum with display furniture to be fabricated in plywood (project in collaboration with Juan Lezcano), 1992-93

Exhibition detail with Couch, Social Fabric... , The Gallery at Green Library, FIU

 

N.I.M.B.Y., 1993, cotton thread and fabric - Collection of Ivelin and Craig Robins

 

"[I]t was when he began to embroider, that grandmotherly pastime, a tradition as hoary and quaint—and, by implication, as useless, art-historically speaking—as keeping too many cats, that Trasobares's critical thinking and refined, if eclectic, tastes blossomed, in a profusion of social commentary, comedic wordplay, interpersonal needling, and generational pep-talk. In such pieces as N.I.M.B.Y. (1992), Surrender and Compromise (1992-93), Subversity, Perversity (1993), Cuadro de subasta (1993-94), Show or Die (1994), and the glorious, let's-poke-the old-dog-with-a-sharp-stick Fidel y Mas Canosa son la misma cosa (1993), the artist gives ample vent to impulses high and low, and new shades of meaning to the term "colorful."


"N.I.M.B.Y. is an acronym for "Not in my backyard"—a provincial sentiment not peculiar to Miami, perhaps, but certainly indicative of the city's more than occasional outbursts of civic peevishness—and it's the malign echo of the syrupy "Home sweet home" that a colonnaded manse by a green stretch of lawn would ordinarily signify. Likewise, you needn't gaze too long into the strange and jolly wooziness of Subversity, Perversity to be reminded that grown men and women once marched in Dade County brandishing signs that read "It's not diversity, it's perversity," a response to the county's human rights ordinance that was no less heartfelt for being mean-spirited and obtuse.


"But to dwell on Trasobares's feel for the plasticity of language is to slight both the solid workmanship of his homely artifacts and their roots deep in the history of contemporary art. One sees the mysteriously coded grid works of Joaquin Torres Garcia in the glad and gaudy Cuadra de subasta, and an appreciation for Bruce Nauman in Show or Die, where the electricity of overlaid reds and greens cannily replicates the fluorescence of actual lighting. Even the redoubtable ghost of prodigious folk art huckster Howard Finster—who plastered everything at hand, even his telephone, with obssessive doodling and Christianflavored ejaculations like "Call Heaven!" and "Get in Touch with Jesus!"—hovers in the enthusiastic overdoing it with which Trasobares places colors side by side. ..."


Joel Weinstein, Introduction to catalogue of SOCIAL FABRIC: Old Pillows and Recent Money Works, The Gallery at the Green Library, Florida International University, 2002

 

Surrender & Compromise, 1992-93, cotton thread and fabric

No se insulte: pregunto por saber, 1994, cotton thread and fabric

No Cede Malis, 1994, cotton thread and fabric

Cuadro de Subasta, 1993-94, cotton thread and fabric

Diversity Perversity, 1993, cotton thread and fabric

Re..., 1994-95, cotton thread and fabric

Fidel y Mas Canosa son la misma cosa, 1993, cotton thread and fabric

Otium Fecundum, 1994, cotton thread and fabric

 

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