Mogollón

Mogollón is an Art Direction studio based in Brooklyn, New York. It began in 2004 when art director and filmmaker Monica Brand joined forces with art director, painter and filmmaker Francisco López to collaborate with PS1/MoMA on a film documentary about The Young Architects Program for PS1's renowned "Warm-Up" series in the summer of 2004.

After this collaboration, they decided to rent a space and create Mogollón as a means to produce art direction for design, film, theater, photography and fashion. Constrained by contemporary limits of elaborating within a singular discipline, Mogollón emerged, interweaving different artistic threads into one piece of work. In so doing, it opens itself to the contemporary and archaic and to vast sensory input.

Both originally from Venezuela, López's and Brand's formation and experiences with art are very different, but also complementary. Cinema and a desire for intimate and unexpected communication bind them together. With self-critical nostalgia, Mogollón pays tribute to the work of artists such as Jack Smith, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alains Resnais, Arnulf Rainer, Agnes Varda, Throbing Gristle, Jean Cocteau, Godard, Sergei Parajanov, Bunuel and Caravaggio, among many others. But, comics are always close by.

Mogollón is suspect of the highly produced digital imagery of the 1990s. Oversaturated by its coldness, Mogollón constructs a handmade renaissance made out of brush strokes and highly crafted drawings that meet not only the pop culture of the early 1960s, but also decorative and almost baroque forms.

Although Mogollón's work is still highly informed by technology, it is apparent that it is guided by a different science, one that lands Mogollón's denizens in a universe where the ellipse and lemniscate are seen anew, as if for the first time. Mogollón's sketchbooks become a cabinet of curiosities out of which emerge an enlightened visualization of the urban environment. We might say that this temporal and artistic collage, involving the most discreet of forms, is these art directors' response to the uncertainty and transformation of our current Modernity.

Currently Mogollón is doing the art direction for a feature film to be shot in Mexico City on September of this year. They are also, at present, collaborating with Tokion magazine and by late summer they will be showing their work at a collective exhibition called "44 Boards" at the Mahan Gallery in Columbus, Ohio. Mogollón continues to produce set, costumes, graphics and designs for independent musicians, choreographers and group theaters.

Written by Jacqueline Loss

All Artwork by Mogollón

Visit Mogollón [website]