José Andrés Mora
AND YOU MOVE
24 March – 21 April 2018

AND YOU MOVE is a storefront display that preoccupies itself by daydreaming about modernist alienation and malaise. For this type of window exhibition space, José Andrés Mora has fabricated an LED sign with scrolling text programmed to communicate with the outside world. Residential storefront signs typically advertise products or services in order to entice passers-by into the building, but Mora’s sign has more existential considerations, which complicate such straightforward relationships between interior and exterior.

AND YOU MOVE offers two simultaneous streams of text; one guttural, onomatopoeic, and affective; the other descriptive, meandering, and directive. Presented at different sizes, in different colours, and scrolling in opposite directions, the texts work both alongside and against each other, undermining any sense of coherence that may be able to be gleaned from either independently. The bottom portion of the sign presents a second-person description of a reader trapped in ad-infinitum loops of unproductive wanderings—-absent-minded and without purpose. The upper portion simply grunts, beeps, groans in strained attempts at self-expression.

The disjuncture between these two displays conjure a semblance of a split consciousness within the screen in an act of becoming. Mora’s sign acts as a form of theatrical speculation, performing what it could be like to be a sign that is, in turn, speculating what it’s like to be a human being. The sign’s incoherent ramblings, however, seems to suggest it is confused about what it is that humans actually do–or perhaps it is trying to express its own meaningless existence by describing monotonous routines that are analogous to its own.

Mora’s approach to language unwinds expectations of textual communication. Not quite spoken, not exactly written, without punctuation, and sometimes backwards; AND IT MOVES employs a foreign mode of communication that is nonetheless fully constituted within the structure of English language. It encourages a subtle shift of how the viewer processes thought, and helping the viewer imagine being other than human and feel like a sign feels.

Inverting the language of advertising–with its efficient focus on impact–Mora’s Mobius texts go nowhere; they are experiential rather than narrative. Revolving around banality, absence, and expression they attempt to snare the viewer in a tragicomic loop of the unremarkable–with sympathy to the lost, the trapped, and the aimless.

After graduating from Capilano University (North Vancouver, British Columbia), José Andrés Mora received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (Halifax, Nova Scotia). Presently, Mora maintains an interdisciplinary practice with a focus on text multimedia installations and video-based work. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.