Ceremonial Technologies

In Ceremonial Technologies artist Jorge Mañes Rubio continues to explore an enigmatic new material language. Common items most of us can find at home (a chair, a plate, a bowl) are completely reimagined, carefully shaped by hand and painstakingly decorated with thousands of colourful glass beads. By getting entangled in the making process, letting materials, shapes and colours find their own rhythm and purpose, the artist explores the role that materiality plays in the negotiation and production of knowledge, myths and spaces.

These shape-shifting entities embrace a circular/mythical conception of time, a realm where power is felt as free-flowing around us in perpetual circulation: a world where past, present and future can happen at the same time, forever linked through objects, peoples and places. Each work features a constellation of symbols, complex images and multi-layered stories, as if coming from an intangible, dream-like dimension. Equally enigmatic and appealing, Ceremonial Technologies seem to remind us about our co-existence with non-human entities and the possibility of inhabiting imagined realms as if they were real, suggesting alternatives to established systems of representation, power and exploitation.

Show Me That You Care.
From the series ‘Ceremonial Technologies’, 2023.
Wood, paper pulp, clay, plaster, gesso, marble powder, beeswax, glass beads and polyester thread.
32x38x100cm.

 

We Can Feel Right Through You.
From the series Ceremonial Technologies, 2023.
Wood, clay, plaster, gesso, marble powder, beeswax, glass beads.
58x23x26cm

“Part object, part creature(s). We Can Feel Right Through You is about vulnerability, about interspecies navigation, multinatural worldviews and fluid transformations. We Can Feel Right Through You is about visions becoming so crystal clear that we learn to see through our bodies, our organs, our bones.”

 

I Hope You Can See the Stars In Me
From the series Ceremonial Technologies, 2022.
Clay, glass beads, nylon thread, cotton thread, dumortierite, green aventurine.
33x31x7cm

 

 

One Hundred Thousand Times Forever.
From the series Ceremonial Technologies, 2022.
Unfired clay, acrylic, hair extensions, quartz.
87 x 47 x 10cm

“Jorge Mañes Rubio is interested in ancestral notions of objects being embedded with a spiritual power. He explores if this potential can be harnessed today through contemporary meanings and materials. In this object carefully crafted in black clay, power is represented by a bright pink hair extension flowing out of a portal guarded by two ibex, two vultures, two deers and an anthropomorphic Iberian lynx with a talisman on its chest. With this work Mañes Rubio hopes to evoke reflections on the renovation of life, the fluidity and permeability between different worlds, and the larger-than-human dimension that defines our very existence.”

 

Where Do We Go From Here?
From the series Ceremonial Technologies, 2021.
Unfired clay, acrylic, hair extensions.
71 x 26 x 8cm