EXHIBITION, LECTURE AND PERFORMANCE by MONICA MAYER and VICTOR LERMA

VIRTUAL DUALITY consisted in the presentation of an exhibition of interchangeable multiple originals on acetate made by both of us, a lecture on our work and a performance.

We showed together for the first time in 1988 in an exhibition called COMPLETAMENTE DIFERENTES, PERO JUNTOS at the Casa de la Cultura Jesús Romero Flores in the colonia Hipódromo Condesa.

From that moment on we have continued working together, both in exhibitions in which each one of us presented his/her own work, but exhibited jointly, as well as in conceptual and process works which we conceptualized and carried out jointly such as all those signed by Pinto mi Raya.

After sharing our lives since 1975 and working almost all our artistic projects jointly since 1989, he have noticed a large number of influences and appropriations, both in the way in which we work, the themes we work on and the production strategies each one of us has developed in our work.

This has been quite natural even though our perspectives are quite different: one is very abstract and the other very figurative; one is more lyrical, the other more political.

Playing with the idea that we know each other so well that we could do each other's work without any problems, we decided to do precisely that: a series of pieces based on the other's work.

For this project each of us made a little over a hundred images using drawing and digitalization. These pieces are printed on transparent letter-sized acetate, which allows us to show them individually or in layers, forming different combinations. These pieces are designed to be shown differently in every occasion, according to the context in which they are presented.

VIRTUAL DUALITY, which had the support of a grant from the Artes por Todas Partes program of the Culture Ministry of Mexico City (Secretaría de Cultura del DF) was shown at the Tacubaya Metro Station at the Azcapotzalco Culture House, at the Jesús Reyes Heroles Culture House, at FARO de Oriente (all in Mexico City) at the Jardín de las Esculturas Museum in Jalapa and as part of the II Bienal de Estandartes in Tijuana, Puebla, Morelia and other cities in Mexico. In many of these presentations we included a talk about Pinto mi Raya.

A second part of this project was VIRTUAL DUALITY: THE PERFORMANCE, a piece we presented several times in 2002 in Japan, although also at the Azcapotzalco Culture House.