Elastic Arts is pleased to announce PAZ: Piñatas & Zines, an exhibition by Oscar Arriola, opening on Saturday, December 9.

In PAZ: Piñatas & Zines, Oscar Arriola uncovers latent potentialities in a conceptual congruence between seemingly unrelated uses of paper. He shows us that there are more connections between piñatas and zines than we might see at first glance. Both are vernacular forms that are emblematic of the communities who use them. Both are inert and unfulfilled without people to activate them. Each object functions – gathering and circulating people in its own way – and becomes an anchor point for the social cohesion by which a community constitutes itself. If zines have often been used to connect communities with esoteric interests and musings dispersed across wide geographies, piñatas perform the blunt task of punctuating a space and marking those gathered there, however briefly, as a community of celebrants. Between these two traditions we see paper used as a surface to encode information and as a cheap material to be dyed and layered to generate expressive forms. Arriola challenges us to envision zines as objects to be exploded open ecstatically, with kids scurrying around to gather up the treats hidden within them; to ask what genealogies of craft and deft economies of material can be made legible in piñatas if we examine them as a sprawling archive of forms passed down through families and local customs.

PAZ: Piñatas & Zines will include photos by Adam Jason Cohen, piñatas by Pau Venadito, Kristi O’Meara, and Will FitzPatrick. Plus images from zines by Andrew Shirley, Keith Herzik, Tom Guenther, Desilu Muñoz, Joe Alone and others.

Curated by: Oscar Arriola

Opening Reception December 9, 2017 at 7:00pm 
@ Elastic Arts
3429 W Diversey Ave, 2nd Fl
Chicago, IL 60647 USA