©Patricia Lagarde, from Ars Combinatoria/Courtesy of the Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico

One of the pleasures of attending the FotoFest 2018 Biennial Meeting Place Reviews was meeting reviewers from around the globe who journied to Houston to celebrate and appreciate photography. I am so grateful to gallerist Patricia Conde Juaristi, of the Patricia Conde Galeria in Mexico City, Mexico for sharing a week of Mexican photographers with the Lenscratch readers. The gallery has specialized in contemporary photography since 2009, and is currently the only Mexican gallery focused on promoting various photographic practices. Today she shares the work of Patricia Lagarde – Aline Smithson

My work has to do with the object as symbol. I am interested in the relationships established between things and the subject that sees, describes, analyzes and names them. Representation as language, as metaphor.

The theme of memory and its construction is constant in the discourse of my work. Memory is at the center of the collections, interminable lists, the spirit of the Wunderkammer, and the Cabinets of curiosities. I consider my work to be open, always in continuous process.

I explore diverse techniques and materials as methods of expression, such as: artist books, installations, photographic displays, boxes, projections, images and moving images. – Patricia Lagarde

©Patricia Lagarde, from Ars Combinatoria/Courtesy of the Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico

Born in México,  in 1960, Patricia Lagarde a notable artist with a unique sensitivity and inclination towards the artist’s book, who explores the early techniques of photography, such as the ambrotype, to obtain images in which the fascination with the mundanity of objects and their categories lead us to the endearing journeys of the memory. The categorization, segmentation and registration of objects are constant in her work, always suggesting a cultural background.

Her photographs and author books are part of collections in the USA such as Stanford University Library, The Paul Getty Foundation, The University of California, Berkeley; In Mexico, the Alumnos 47 Foundation, in the MH Documentation Center, in the Museo Archivo de la Fotografía, the University Center of the UAQ of Querétaro, etc; As well as in various private collections.

She has exhibited her work individually and collectively in various galleries and museums, both in Mexicoand abroad, in institutions such: the Centro de la Imagen, the Museum of Modern Art, the Carrillo Gil Museum, the Museum of Natural History, the Alvarez Bravo Museum, and CENART in Mexico, and at the Ocurrance Gallery, Montreal, Canada, the Lowicka Cultural Center, Warsaw, the Hong Kong Cultural Center, CODEX International Book Fair, Richmond, Cal., USA, among others.

©Patricia Lagarde, from Ars Combinatoria/Courtesy of the Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico

©Patricia Lagarde, from Ars Combinatoria/Courtesy of the Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico

©Patricia Lagarde/Courtesy of the Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico

About her series, Interrogate the habitual.

If naming the world is a difficult enterprise, trying to catalog it, to order it, becomes a utopia. That is why Interrogate the usual proposes a machinery that recreates inventories, an artifact to point poetic correspondences and evoke analogies. A game where all order prescribes immediately after being proclaimed. A file whose taxonomies are constantly reinventing themselves.

Interrogate the habitual is an attempt to renegotiate the order of things, to subvert it to construct new metaphors using and recycling everything that already exists, to look at it with other eyes that reveal the spectrum, the invisible side of existence.

©Patricia Lagarde/Courtesy of the Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico

©Patricia Lagarde/Courtesy of the Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico

©Patricia Lagarde/Courtesy of the Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico

©Patricia Lagarde/Courtesy of the Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico

©Patricia Lagarde, Bureau of identification/Courtesy of the Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico

©Patricia Lagarde, from Tea for Two/Courtesy of the Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico

©Patricia Lagarde, from Tea for Two/Courtesy of the Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico

©Patricia Lagarde, from Tea for Two/Courtesy of the Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico

©Patricia Lagarde, from Tea for Two/Courtesy of the Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico

©Patricia Lagarde/Courtesy of the Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico

©Patricia Lagarde, Contacto/Courtesy of the Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico

©Patricia Lagarde, from Prisma Durero/Courtesy of the Patricia Conde Galeria, Mexico