Pancho Westendarp: Tension & Compression

Pancho Westendarp
One Meter in One Hour, 2018
1 hour video
Stills
©2018 Pancho Westendarp/Robert Henry Contemporary

Project Space:
Pancho Westendarp: Tension & Compression
February 23 - April 8, 2019

Opening reception: Friday, February 23 from 6-9pm
 

Brooklyn, NY – January 25, 2018 – Pancho Westendarp's work seeks to analyze relationships between time, space, memory and movement. This exhibition in our project space, his third exhibition with the gallery, will present a new video projection entitled One Meter in One Hour.

The average human walking speed is about 5 kilometers per hour. In Westendarp’s one hour video we see the artist in his studio walking 1 full meter in 1 hour marking a black line of the same length on the wall as he walks. Westendarp’s tense body movements reflect this extreme squeezing of about 5 km into 1 meter and project a sense of claustrophobic compression. Our contemporary times require faster and faster speeds and higher and higher productivity. By turning this need for more and faster on its head and doing much less in the same amount of time, Westendarp seeks to create a new ritual whereby the doing of less can challenge our regular notions of distance, time and speed. The artist’s long journey of one meter in one hour is painstakingly performed before us and “it can change the state of mind of a person as any other kind of trip does.” Says Westendarp, “By compressing distance and tensing time we can explore a way of traveling that opens up new possibilities of experiences in a minimum space."

Westendarp’s work subverts societal constructions of time by reformulating representations of it in ways that don’t standardize human experience under the same circumstances. He says, “Developing our own way of measuring time means creating our own notion of history and developing new rituals where time can be practical and playful, where faith and mechanics can interact, where procedures can become purposeless, and where movement is not understood by distance traveled but by the change of a state of mind.”
 

Born in 1978, Mexican artist Pancho Westendarp earned a BA from Tecnológico de Monterrey, Queretano and received an MA in Documentary Production in 2005 from the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain. In 2009 he received a Fulbright Scholarship to attend Stony Brook University and recieved his MFA in 2012. In 2015 his work was included in the 1st Landscape Biennial, Museo Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City and in 2016 his work was included in the XVII Photography Biennial at Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City. He lives Mexico City and maintains studios in Queretano, Mexico and Mexico City.