Carlos Monroy’s work questions the bounds between live-action performance, photography, and video. He recreates historic action pieces, using them as re-contextualizing exercises to comprehend the time and space each piece offers. Monroy cultivates an awareness that each piece is unique and unrepeatable, but also changeable and mutable according to the place and the one who performs it. Regularly, his work questions the typical cliches used in live action art like the unmeasured use of the nude, or the excess of symbolic elements; he uses these tropes with a conscious tone, or as a self-sabotage, to critique the medium itself.

Since his early works, Monroy has involved his relatives, the public, and himself dynamically, using sense of humor and sarcasm to avoid barriers between art and spectators. For example, he lets them decide what he has to do during the piece or he makes them laugh to break the ritualistic condition that performance has come to assume. Monroy’s performance service No. 1 Mr. Kosuth what would you do? (2010) was a performance installation formatted after Joseph Kosuth’s iconic piece of conceptual art, One and Three Chairs (1965). For his recreation, Monroy substituted Kosuth’s subject “chair” with the subject “performance,” inviting the audience to change any of the three elements of piece: the definition of “performance,” the photograph representation of “performance,” or the action done by the performer (Monroy). This resulted in many humorous contributions such as the definition, “A bunch of weirdos who love to get naked and scream about leftist politics” and Monroy acting out the instruction to strip to his underwear and chug wine. Like his practice in general, this work employs elements such as surprise and absurdity to actively involve the public.

Solo exhibitions of Monroy’s work have been presented in Brazil at the Oficina Cultural Oswald de Andrade, Ateliê 397, and the Paço das Artes. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of the Bank of the Republic of Colombia, and Sala de Proyectos in Bogotá.

Courtesy of the artist