From Camilo Ontiveros in Miracle Mile, ArtSlant by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, July 26.2009
Old, beat up, and broken, many with deep scratches and nicks in their white or ochre enamel paint, thirteen washing machines and dryers in various states of disrepair cluster around the crisp, white walls of the gallery. Camilo Ontiveros amassed this collection of tired appliances in the weeks leading up to this exhibition, through brightly colored bi-lingual posters advertising fifteen dollar payments per used machine. Continuing his ongoing consideration of the underground economies and labor conditions related to Mexican immigration into the Southland, Ontiveros bought the salvaged machines from the often-undocumented immigrants who scavenge residential sidewalks for free discarded items and thrown out appliances that may be able to be fixed and/or sold for scrap. Link.
From Art Review: Camilo Ontiveros at Steve Turner Contemporary Art. Los Angeles Times by Christopher Knight, August 7, 2009.
For his solo gallery debut, Ontiveros posted street signs offering to buy new or used washing machines and dryers, operational or not, for $15 apiece. A lime-green sign is posted in the gallery window, together with two beat-up machines that he bought.
Inside, the gallery looks like a used-appliance store, albeit with a twist. A total of 20 washing machines — Maytag, GE, Whirlpool and, especially, Kenmore, the popular Sears brand — are on display, most in varying states of rusting decay that mars their white, off-white and almond enameled surfaces. They’re clustered in groups, the repeated boxy shapes suggesting the serial forms of Minimalist sculpture — except for one anomaly: Near the center of the room, an ancient drum-shaped machine, complete with old-fashioned wringer and vertical agitator, stands in splendid isolation.
Four other machines are also isolated, although each of these is pushed up against a different wall. Ontiveros sent these four to an automotive body shop for an exquisite paint jobs. Bright green, rich eggplant, hot pink (tellingly, a Lady Kenmore) and burnished gold — the machines have been transformed into hybrids of sculpture and painting. Link.