1644 West Chicago Ave, #1
Chicago IL
TemenosMisael José Oquendo
Misael José Oquendo
March 14th - April 12, 2025
A shepherd on a mountaintop lifts his horn to his lips and plays a melody. The mountains return his song to him, not in the exact tones he gave them, but altered, distant, refracted by space and time. The song, no longer merely his own, is imbued with something beyond him—the breath of the world, the voice of the unseen.
–
Inspired by Vyacheslav Ivanov’s Thoughts on
Symbolism (1912)
With Temenos, Misael Oquendo presents a world in echos. A series of symbols generated with Artificial Intelligence that dissolve the distinction between the synthetic and the organic. ‘Temenos’ is of Greek origin. An ancient word that situates the show in a context of epochs. It refers not just to a sanctified enclosure set apart from the mundane world, but a realm of transformation and reflection. It is this mirroring that Oquendo dives into with the works. At first glance, the exhibition is contained, even stoic. Modest prints, paced videos, and natural soundscapes are the exhibition's exterior, but just below the skin an immense tension simmers, breaking an otherwise calm surface in nauseating bursts. As the distinction between original and replica dissolves, we near the point of complete saturation, and the uncanny valley becomes a sinkhole.
Crown Fountain (2025), the central video installation, is the show’s fulcrum. Titled as a subtle nod (read: irreverent reflection) to Jaume Plensa’s Millennium Park installation a few miles east, Crown Fountain (2025) consists of two video components; Hands Tableaux (Nature) and Hands Tableaux (Crown). The former draws inspiration from the rich visual lexicon of nature as captured by National Geographic, Discovery Channel, and other legacy media. The video implicates us as the protagonist in a cinematic experience. We look down at our own hands, which are less an agent of action and more a symbol of longing. We pause to gaze as the forms shift, transitioning between recognizable and amorphous masses of nature, always beyond our grasp.
If Hands Tableaux (Nature) asks us to slow for a moment, then the nine corresponding prints stop us completely, fossilizing these transitions in time. Photographic screen grabs of this original video, the prints reflect the circular world of nature—a cycle of growth and death that, having mastered itself over millions of years, needs no further innovation. The mental state of the natural world, in which our typical consumption patterns become impossible, is what Jenny Odell refers to in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) as “bird time.”
“Bird-watching is the opposite of looking something up online. You can’t really look for birds; you can’t make a bird come out and identify itself to you. The most you can do is walk quietly and wait until you hear something. …(bird watching) is thus a way of catching a ride out of the grid and toward a time sense so different that it is barely imaginable to us.”
If the exhibition’s images insist on slowing down, then the tools of their creation demand speed. In the short months between the work’s creation and its exhibition, the capacity of AI has accelerated with such force that the program used to create the Hands Tableaux has become obsolete, a hollow carcass of a bygone era. When pitted against “bird time,” this growth is a lightning flash. The jumbo jet has replaced the coal train overnight, and the exhilaration of speed is becoming the fear of death.
Though the subtext of death permeates the exhibition, this fear reveals itself most directly in the video on the rear side of Crown Fountain. Hands Tableaux (Crown) and its single corresponding framed print focus their attention on the mouth, particularly on teeth. Teeth, a symbol reinforced by small Temu-sourced replicas installed as the exhibition’s footnote, are the interface between the self and the external world. They are the first step of digestion, the tool of consumption. Generative AI systems are by nature consumptive—trained on massive datasets, they digest and reconstitute, actively metabolizing information to create new energy. As in any consumption, a hierarchy is implied: the eater and the eaten, and with it, the fear of death—being reduced to non-human matter for a greater being to consume. This most ancient fear, and the anxiety that comes with losing our place at the top of the food chain, seems inseparable from the technological growth of our epoch. And yet, a rapidly growing body of scientific study has shown that organisms do not simply “disappear” into the bodies that eat them, but rather, long after digestion, the eaten participate in regulating the vital functions of their consumer. Metabolism, by definition, is symbiotic. “You are what you eat” echoes back as “you eat what you are” in a circular song of fathomless proportion, an infinite unfolding of meaning we both drink and are drowned in.
Exhibition text written by Miles Jackson,
Los Angeles-based artist and designer.
Install photos by Bob. (Robert Chase Heishman)
As part of Temenos, Tala is pleased to present a special auxiliary screening of Gothico’s Quench (2024), an animated short film that extends the exhibition’s exploration of obsession, desire, and the instability of meaning in digital culture. Gothico’s Quench is an 11-minute and 57-second animated short film that blends CGI imagery with Generative AI methods, such as image-to-video generations and text-to-speech generation. This experimental film explores the theme of obsession, disillusionment, and relentless pursuit of unattainable desires through the surreal story of an aging jewel thief named Gothico. The narrative unfolds in a whimsical world where Gothico becomes entranced by material goods such as shiny jewels or his toy train set, looping endlessly through variations of the “Trolley Problem,” and later by the mystical allure of a black latex catsuit and the metaphysical quest for the apple of knowledge. Through a blend of digital techniques, the film paints a narrative that reflects both the allure and the limitations of our quests for meaning—whether in material treasures, philosophical ideas, or technological innovations. In this world, Gothico’s search becomes a Sisyphean struggle, where each step toward enlightenment only deepens his sense of yearning and dissatisfaction. Gothico’s Quench can be viewed as an allegory for the obsession with the shiny allure of new technologies. Much like Gothico’s fading attraction to material treasures, the film reflects on the desire for “new” or “high” fidelity imagery in digital culture and our collective search for deeper meaning beyond superficial online engagements. In its visual and thematic form, the film blurs the stylistic boundaries of fairy tales and disneyfied narratives bound in a coercive loss of innocence. The AI-generated elements, including imagery and voices, throughout the film display a high degree of instability and in this way are reminiscent of early internet aesthetics—recalling a time when users explored the potential of emerging digital tools and mediums, often resulting in raw, glitchy, and unpredictable outputs.
Misael Oquendo (born in 1993 in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico) is a video artist, writer, and researcher specializing in 3D design, experimental animation, and post-production editing. His work explores the cultural and emotional implications of technology, blending speculative storytelling, digital performance, and media aesthetics to examine how mediated environments shape perception and social experience. Oquendo received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016), an MA in Aesthetics & Politics from CalArts (2020), and has studied with the New Centre for Research & Practice. His work has been exhibited and screene at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Los Angeles Filmforum, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Human Resources LA, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, Le Grand Action Cinema in Paris, and Guerrero Gallery in Los Angeles.
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