Manuel Piña: Naufragios

Manuel Piña is concerned with everyday imagery and the way it appears in modern-day culture. His two-channel video installation for the video wall at the Surrey Arts Centre, titled after the Spanish word for "shipwreck," captures concerns about utopia, migration, and space. By editing imagery of the ocean, Piña's work reflects upon time and image-making. Over the course of the video, footage of the ocean endlessly twists and fragments. In the process, Piña creates dizzying geometric patterns. The project extends Piña’s ongoing investigation of ephemera and abstraction in lens-based media. His art speaks to force and movement in the form of wakes, ripples, and waves.

About the Artist

Manuel Piña is an artist, teacher, and social and spiritual activist. His research adopts spirituality and technology as a way of expanding upon present realities and challenges. Piña is co-founder of the Newtribes School, an online and land-based global network of healers, teachers, and cultural and software activists working towards the preservation and dissemination of ancestral wisdom and language. Piña was born in Havana and graduated as mechanical engineer in Vladimir, Russia, in 1983. He began exhibiting his art in 1992. He has been a professor at the University of British Columbia since 2004, and his work has been exhibited globally.

Curator: Rhys Edwards
Origin of Exhibition: Surrey Art Gallery