THE Magazine - Los Angeles

Mondongo is made up of Argentineans Agustina Picasso, Juliana Laffitte, and Manuel Mendanha, a team whose work abounds with metaphors about societal and religious belief systems and human compulsions, including the urge to procreate and the desire to withhold or reveal information. Their latest exhibition, Gaslighting, -- the title referring to a form of psychological torture -- compels us to contemplate what transpires before and after an action and to acknowledge the literal and figurative meanings of light and material.

El Sueño de la Razón...II (The Dream of Reason...II) depicts a dead woman lying facedown, perhaps discovered at dawn by a passerby. She is a grotesque beauty, at once provocative and disturbing. Her skin and the ground around her glisten in glitter and broken glass, as if adorned in morning dew. The feeling is that of a nightmare, or an especially brutal reality.

In a dark, curtained room, Fluo Flora (tree), laden with glow-in-the-dark thread, sat atop a pool of milky dried-fluid representative of semen. Surrounding the tree were twenty-four Fauna Fluo animals "painted" with that luminous thread on Plexiglas panels. When the lights were on, the animals disappeared into the white walls. They reappeared when the lights went out, reinforcing their Darwinian implications.

Across the way George, fabricated in condoms, sat behind a door with a hole cut out like a XXX adult peep show. Encompassing our entire view was a silly grin surrounded by a ridiculous daisy motif. When finished with the display, we could turn off the light to reveal a "dirty little secret" -- a portrait of Osama Bin Laden.

Gaslighting showed us inherent behavioral fallacies, attempts at control, and futile outcomes. The only thing for sure, the exhibition demonstrated, is birth and death. Everything in between is as fleeting as a dream, or the morning after.