Habitos Actuales

"We are interested in the subjective, the arbitrary, the chaotic, the neglected, the inefficient, the redundant, the absurd, and the agency to rethink the public."

—Habitos Actuales

Miriam Gallery is pleased to present Six Good Ways To…, a site-specific exhibition by Habitos Actuales, a collective founded by artists Mariana Saldarriaga and Juan Pablo Uribe.

Six Good Ways To… is the result of many months of bi-weekly conversations, archival research, and photo documentation by the artists and the founders of Miriam, with the gallery as the subject. Drawing upon an already established methodology of interrogation, the artists have performed an almost archeological investigation into Miriam: peeling back the layers and layers of paint, peering into the drywall, examining any renovation decision, and documenting found objects left from years before Miriam’s existence. From a pair of cymbals found in the building’s basement, to the back gallery’s wooden floors once used in a dance studio, to the left-behind drill holes in the gallery’s office space, the artists have left no corner of Miriam unobserved. Even the smallest, seemingly mundane moments are memorialized in new works comprising photography, painting, sculpture, and site-specific interventions.

The exhibition is divided into six categories/works:

To Camouflage: a textile and video homage to the history of the dance studio floor and its continued presence in Miriam’s back gallery.

To Overlay: an intervention on the facade of the gallery, re-interpreting and redacting NYC’s Forever Graffiti Free Form which gives the city indefinite license to remove graffiti “in a manner it deems appropriate.”

To Renovate: a vinyl of Miriam during a moment of renovation in-between exhibitions––an aspirational and

humorous message about the everyday mundane, in the style of architectural renderings.

To Compose: a collection of 50 paintings memorializing details of Miriam’s interior, displayed in a postcard rack, to celebrate the space as a pictorial subject.

To Hoard: an installation of 100 images documenting the years of objects and detritus found in the building’s basement, cataloging what is left behind as a witness of time.

To Cover-up: a tapestry in dialogue with the domesticity of Miriam’s building, installed in the window of the vestibule connecting the commercial with the residential––a recognition of the histories and strategies of the residents to remain private.

An accompanying publication (edition of 100) compiles the six categories as box-set, and utilizes each category as a guide to examine works and research from the duo’s past archives.

The exhibition traces a lineage of conversation between artists Mariana Saldarriaga and Juan Pablo Uribe dating back to 2019. From WeChat to Zoom, the artists, [one, Mariana] in Colombia and [one, Juan Pablo] in the US, began a running dialogue of spontaneous images and responses to the urban landscape of Bogotá developed during the mayoral terms of Enrique Peñalosa. Through ongoing investigations and an archive comprising over 3,000 images, Mariana and Juan Pablo put a spotlight on the notions of “utopian” planning in the lexicon of urban development, and its ultimate effect on society. Their ongoing project, Mientras Allá Trabajan y Progresan, interrogates the notions of beauty, progress, and renewal by taking Bogotá’s Public Space Handbook as a cautionary tale.

The artists’ extensive research and procedural approaches to documentation have resulted in a methodology that can be transferred into other spaces. In conceptualizing a “how-to” for Six Good Ways To..., Habitos Actuales asks us to acknowledge what we cover up, what to patch over, and to acknowledge the aesthetic ambitions of shaping a community. The artists poke fun at the language of renovation, humorously questioning notions of the progressive, the dignified, the modern, and the aesthetics hidden behind technical narratives. This is, by far, the most collaborative exhibition Miriam has exhibited, and in some ways, is quite the opposite of an exhibition––with the gallery as subject, the gallery is not neutral, the walls are not white.

Mariana Saldarriaga is a Colombian artist and designer. She holds a Bachelor in Fine Arts and one in Communication Design from Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia.

Installation, mixed media, found objects, extensive lists, and sculptural and editorial gestures are transversal around her work. Over the past years, she has been obsessed with accumulating and archiving photos of random scenes she sees in the streets. Since 2019 she has participated in “Hábitos Actuales”, a collective project in collaboration with Juan Pablo Uribe.

Her work has been shown in several group shows in spaces like Espacio Odeón, Espacio KB, Universidad de los Andes, Centro Colombo Americano, and Galería Casas Hoffman.She has an ongoing collaboration with Sad Belonging Press (Sandberg University, Amsterdam) on several collective editorial projects. She has been awarded with the Communication Arts: Typography Annual Winner (2018), LAD Latin American Design Awards (2018), PDC: Participatory Design Conference (2020) and Idartes: winner of one of the scholarships for independent publishing projects in the Photobook category.

This is her first exhibition in NYC.

Juan Pablo Uribe is a Colombian artist. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture and a Bachelor in Fine Arts from the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá) and a Master in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University (New York). His work has been shown in several group shows and art fairs, and solo shows in Colombia, Peru, and Mexico. He has been selected through open calls to be exhibited at Artbo-Bogota’s International art fair (Bogota, 2017), Espacio Odeón (Bogota, 2020), Universidad de los Andes (Bogota, 2021), amongst others.In 2018 he was awarded first prize in the Colombian Young Artists Award, given by the ColSanitas, the Spanish Embassy, and Nueveochenta gallery in Bogota.His work is part of various collections in Peru, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and the U.S. He currently lives in New York.

Together, the artists formed Habitos Actuales in 2019, and their collective work has been exhibited in Espacio Odeon, Universidad de los Andes, and Project Anywhere (The New School - University of Melbourne).