GRAND FORKS, NORTH DAKOTA.-The North Dakota Museum of Art presents Juan Manuel Echavarria, on view through October 9, 2005. Juan Manuel Echavarría spent twenty years as a novelist before turning to conceptual photography and video in 1996 in order to confront the violence that rules his own country. The artist works in series, always creating art rather than documentaries.

Echavarría uses beauty to seduce his viewer into his world. His definition of beauty, however, encompasses the knowledge that at the core of all beauty lies awkwardness, ugliness even. The deformity that underpins Echavarría’s art is the violence that inhabits the heart of Colombia.

Echavarría retired his pen and turned to photography to confront the violence that has plagued his country for more then fifty years. As a former novelist, Echavarría emerged from the world of fiction to give voice to the voiceless; humanize the dehumanized; and provide names for the nameless. The imagery and metaphors found in his writing have carried over into his conceptual photography and documentary-style videos. His emotionally charged work thickens the often-thin memory that exists in those that have chosen to forget the death and violence that rocked Colombia. The four-minute video titled Bolívar’s Platter speaks directly of drug money that has filtered into presidential campaigns, the pockets of congressional members, and the paramilitary and guerilla fighters. Based on a suite of ten photographs, a porcelain platter is being smashed frame by frame; the only sound is that of the platter being reduced to a fine powder. Instead of the powder drifting off into the wind in the last frame, it coalesces into a perfect mound of glistening cocaine.