Talking Shit with My Jaguar Face (Iteration I), 2024

Dimensions

24.5” H x 24.75” W

Medium

38 colour Silkscreen on Somerset Velvet Buff, 280gsm

Edition of 45 

$3,000

Eamon Ore-Giron with the painting ‘Talking Shit with My Jaguar Face’ in his Los Angeles studio, 2024

About the artwork

Ollin Editions is proud to announce the release of Talking Shit with My Jaguar Face (Iteration I), our first collaboration with the Los Angeles-based artist Eamon Ore-Giron, on March 15, 2024. This limited edition print marks our company’s inaugural launch, and we are delighted that it coincides with the artist's inclusion in the Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing, which opens to the public on March 20.

Ore-Giron’s multidisciplinary practice includes painting, video, textiles, music, and performance, and explores the possibilities of cross-cultural influences across geographies and time. The artist is best known for his abstract geometric paintings, and his compositions are defined by rigorously calibrated spatial relationships of form and color. Ore-Giron’s most recent works, part of his Talking Shit series, reside within the generative space between abstraction and figuration, and mine our ongoing relationship with symbols of culture and the ways in which they come to hold ideas around individual and collective identities. This idea—the mutability of cultural symbols and the making and remaking of their significance—is a touchstone of Ore-Giron’s overall practice.

The Talking Shit series reflects Ore-Giron’s consideration of how cultural symbols speak across history as their meanings shift, and on a more personal note, represent an imagined conversation between the artist and deities from Mexico and Peru’s ancestral past; Ore-Giron has remixed and reconsidered these traditional figures through his own lens. This re-imagining is a form of “talking shit,” a colloquial dialogue that takes the historical and cultural import of these symbols and brings them into the realm of personal exchange. 

The new print edition, Talking Shit with My Jaguar Face (Iteration I), is based on a painting that was created as a study for a larger work, and continues to expand the material possibilities of the Talking Shit series, which was begun in 2017. Ore-Giron is invested in the frictions and evolutions that occur during the translation of an image across mediums and through collaborations with others, a process that creates space for fruitful and unexpected artistic interpretation. The themes of multiplicity and simultaneity—central to Ore-Giron’s wide-ranging practice—lend themselves appropriately to the discipline of printmaking, in which there is a dialogue between the hand of the printmaker and the eye of the artist. In this instance, Ollin Editions and Ore-Giron worked closely with the master printmaker Daniel Wlazlak to create a new variation on the artist’s work, one that retains the vibrant colors and natural-feeling symmetries of the painting, but also adds the rich texture of the paper and the minute calibrations of the printmaker.

Ore-Giron was inspired by a funerary mask excavated from a tomb at Huaca Loro in northern Peru. He was struck by the elegance and aggression conveyed by the mask, and in the painting, he has reimagined his own face as that of a jaguar, an animal that for Ore-Giron embodies those same characteristics. While the Talking Shit series primarily focuses on deities from ancient Peruvian and Mexican cultures, important artifacts from those cultures have also been the subject of other paintings within the series. Ore-Giron was interested in ideas of disguise and transformation as he reinvented/reimagined his own face in Talking Shit with My Jaguar Face (Iteration I). By conflating the recognizability of ancestry with the mutability of universal symbology, Ore-Giron continues to probe the idea of cultural symbols living new lives.

Eamon Ore-Giron (b. 1973, Tucson, USA) blends a wide-range of visual styles and influences in his brightly colored abstract geometric paintings. Referencing indigenous and craft traditions, such as Native American medicine wheels and Amazonian tapestries, as well as 20th-century avant-gardes, from Russian Suprematism to Latin American Concrete Art, his paintings move between temporalities and resonate across cultural contexts. Ore-Giron also works in video and music, and his interdisciplinary projects explore the interrelationship of sound, color, rhythm, and pattern, and make manifest a history of transnational exchange.

Ore-Giron has exhibited nationally and internationally and is featured in the Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than The Real Thing (on view March 20–August 11, 2024). A 20-year survey of his painting practice was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in 2022 and traveled to The Contemporary Austin in 2023. His work, as a solo practitioner and as part of collaborative endeavors, has also been shown at the Anderson Collection at Stanford University (2021); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); LAXART, Los Angeles (2015); OFF Biennale Cairo (2015); Pérez Art Museum Miami (2013); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2008); El Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte (MUCA), Roma, Mexico City (2006); and in Prospect.3, New Orleans (2014). Ore-Giron has been selected to realize major public commissions in New York and Los Angeles, and he was the 2020–2022 Presidential Visiting Artist at Stanford University. Ore-Giron received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is represented by James Cohan Gallery, New York, and Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia.

Artwork photography courtesy of Charles White/JWPictures. Portrait photography courtesy of Emiliano Granado.

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