Miguel Calderón's short 35mm film Guest of Honor follows a family who encounter a deer on a Sunday picnic excursion and adopt it as a domestic pet with bizarre and scatological consequences. Calderón has made installations, paintings — once installed in the movie The Royal Tenenbaums — sculptures, films and a TV-style soap opera. In The Disciple of Speed (2004), a film documenting the life of an upper-class Mexican woman with psychic powers who drives race cars on the professional circuit, Calderón reveals his ongoing preoccupations of class, culture and sexuality through an engaging, occasionally slapstick and always exhilarating trash aesthetic, focusing on the fantastic aspirations inherent in the everyday.
Miguel Calderón (b. 1971) is a Mexican artist based in Mexico City. Recent group exhibitions include ‘Ultra Baroque: Aspects of Post Latin American Art’, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2001), ‘In the Air: Projections of Mexico’, Guggenheim Museum, New York, and ‘Prometer no empobrece: arte contemporáneo mexicano’, Reina Sofía National Art Museum, Madrid (both 2005). Calderón has also recently shown in the Yokohama Triennial (2005), the Sharjah Biennial (2005) and the São Paulo Biennial (2004). Miguel Calderón's Guest of Honor was co-commissioned by Frieze Projects/LUX and shown daily during the fair in The Artists Cinema. This film toured UK cinemas, shown before main features, through the Independent Cinema Office.