Based in Mexico city, Carlos Amorales is an artist who embraces many art forms, including large installations, performance, drawing, painting, and animation. Black Cloud is a site-specific installation in which the artist, along with the help of 14 others, arranged more than 30,000 black paper moths to the walls and ceilings of several gallery spaces. The thousands of creatures range in a wide variety of sizes and species, but they are all the same color, apropos of the piece’s title. The exhibit has been held in the Yvon Lambert gallery in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and also inside an old baroque church in Spain called Espacio AV.
Individually, each tiny winged creature appears delicate and attractive. However, upon viewing the collection as a whole, the installation can feel a bit daunting and overwhelming. Swarms of moths consume every nook, and, were they alive, would most likely cause visitors to turn around and escape from the space immediately. The constructed takeover leads visitors on a dubious journey through a room dominated by questions of whether the creatures will, in fact, fly up in a swarm of chaos or remain affixed to their positions on the wall.
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