Alternate Location III: ECO-logics presents the work of two Puerto Rican emerging artists: Frances Gallardo and Zaida Adriana Goveo Balmaseda. Their work sets into dialogue dichotomous notions of placement/displacement, natural/urban, organic/inorganic, and links these ideas with memory, loss, exile, trauma, and recovery.
For this particular exhibition, the artists explore these themes through works on paper, weaving, and organic materials, and add new layers of meaning to an ongoing curatorial project that focuses on researching and representing Latin American, Caribbean, and Puerto Rican emerging artists inland and it’s diaspora.
Nov. 21 – 24
MECANISMO, MECA ART FAIR
SJU, PR
Related links:
At MECA Art Fair, A Feeling of Coming Together, By Sebastián Meltz-Collazo for Garage Magazine.
Alternate Location II: (In)tangible Memories presents the work of artists Gabi Pérez-Silver, from Puerto Rico, and Valentina Siniego, from Mexico via Argentina. Alternate Location is an ongoing curatorial series with a particular focus on representing Puerto Rican creatives and connecting artists from Latin America, the Caribbean, and their diasporas.
Both photographers, through their distinct visual languages, have altered the limits that frame photography today. Siniego’s work is doused with an obsessive archival sensibility to “clouds”, documenting and registering them in her correspondence with an ex-lover, a precise – yet unreliable - meditation on the state of the sky. Her work makes viewers confront their personal relationships as changing both others and Chronos, time itself. On the other hand, Pérez-Silver’s photographs are an honest and intimate portrayal of the individuals and surroundings that make up her universe. While Pérez-Silver’s work alludes to traditional portraiture, she is not restricted by the human form and incorporates other elements that compliment, alternate, and challenge how we read and interpret this well-established genre. Siniego and Pérez-Silver deal in alterity, navigating their unique sociopolitical and cultural contexts, which manifest in a landscape of photography, photo books, and inanimate objects.
Alternate Location II: (In)tangible Memories will include Siniego’s photography series Meteorologías: El estado del cielo. Correspondencia. This piece, a 43 sheet grid, is a simple yet powerful artist’s book that registers the passing of time. Be it a passing plane or umbrella, the traces of our existence on this planet are conveyed as presence and absence, as material as clouds. Pérez-Silver’s ongoing Instagram series @ObsesiónSombra is on the same note, striving to share fleeting moments with someone. Her photographs capture the ephemerous nature of a shadow’s “lifetime” as to immortalize a passing thing, an optical phenomenon. Her subject, shadows, are fleeting, ever-changing, and much like loss, completely untouchable. Both series will be arranged in a delicate and colorful grid of small framed prints, in order to contrast their respective aesthetics. But more importantly, to capture and organize their morphing, intangible subject matter: clouds and shadows.
Nov. 16 – 19, 2018
MECANISMO, MECA ART FAIR
SJU, PR
Artist in the Special Exhibition Booth at MECANISMO, MECA:
Frances Gallardo and Andria Morales
As part of MECA’s special exhibition section, MECANISMO, Sofía Reeser del Rio (New York, NY / Culebra, PR), an emerging independent curator, showcases her project Localidades Alternas I / Alternate Locations I; a dialogue between the work of two Puerto Rican emerging artists living in New York, Andria Morales and Frances Gallardo, who work in alternate spaces*, navigating the social-political and cultural landscapes in which they find themselves, both working with ideas of placement and displacement, nature and city, the organic and inorganic.
*alternate spaces as a state of critical self-reflection of what constitutes a self and collective identity.
1 - 4 of June 2017
Artists in the exhibition:
Amara Abdal Figueroa, Elia Alba, Firelei Báez, Melissa Calderón, Lizania Cruz, Megan Curet, Camilo Godoy, Jorge González and Chemi Rosado-Seijo, Alicia Grullon, Adal Maldonado, Steve Maldonado Silvestrini, Carlos Martiel, Proyectos Sabrosos, Heryk Tomassini, Lulu Varona
Self-Organize / Auto-Organizar looks at work that challenges and reimagines the physical, emotional, and geographical boundaries of identity. These artists investigate the construction and destruction of identity, of what constitutes being through the use of their body, installations, books, interviews, videos, and paintings. The exhibition asks us to reflect on how, what, and why we are taking matters into our own hands through the works of artists who mobilize, respond, expose, heal, and rebuild together. Often, it is artists that lead efforts to address the needs of their community when the system, the government, and aid fall short.
At the opening reception on Wednesday, November 15, 2017, 6-9pm, Proyectos Sabrosos / Sabroso Projects invite visitors to join the Decolonized Republic by registering and receiving a passport with a new visual identity for the post-resistance in Puerto Rico.
Exhibition at Bronx Art Space | November 8 - December 16
Curator, Sofia Reeser del Rio, Curatorial Assistant, Kiara Ventura
Still Here is a declaration of Latinx LGBTQ artists against adversity, an affirmation of our histories, and a call to action. The exhibition brings together a group of contemporary artists working across disciplines and whose work creates worlds in which LGBTQ bodies become visible to the world, addresses a broad spectrum of cultural experiences, and carves space for queer bodies of color to reclaim their history.
Each artist defines social constructs around gender identity from personal to social, to fiscal and political. By understanding the reasons why these conditions exists we can then foster critical analysis of what defines queer Latinx art. How queer and Latinx artists and their subjects see themselves is at the core of the themes explored in this year’s Fuerza Fest Festival, Breaking Down Walls. As with all questions of identity, there is never one set answer, but there are plenty of intriguing questions: Can art contribute to the liberation of the oppressed? Can it help us to collectively move forward? And what have we done here today to get us closer to that goal? Cristy C. Road celebrates the queer community in her work through a series of tarot cards and a playful approach to divination. David Antonio Cruz also plays with the camp and queer “realness” by replicating elements of traditional painting with mixed media to “serve” viewers queer brown power. In Andria Morales’s photographic series As You Change: 2010 + 2014, we see a documentation of her best friend transitioning from female to male.
Body-as-a-performative-space is a concept present in the work of Miguel Anaya, a professionally trained dancer who uses his body and photography as a way to create a new stage of ideas. This concept also permeates into the work and process of Marin Watts who creates human scale naked body imprints that meditate on the codes that make up a body. This work is contrasted with José Luis Cortés’s black and white paintings, or “sex ads,” of naked male bodies over newspaper print from a time before hook-up apps.
The two video pieces in the exhibition, by Cristóbal Guerra and Eduardo Velázquez, both explore migration stories and raise questions as to why one leaves one’s birth place. The question is also present in subtext behind Vanessa Rondón’s larger-than life portrait series as well as the Queer Icons by Gabriel Garcia Roman. While Glendalys Medina’s black and gold paintings shift the show’s focus from the body to question traditional systems in architecture, language, image, and culture.
Exhibition dates: May 10-21, 2017
Curated by Richard Morales and Sofia Reeser del Rio
BETWEEN US I & II
Entre Nosotros (Between Us) Variation I, is an audio-visual and interactive, recreating the illusion of a beach environment stuck in time, wrapped around in an indoor space, using video projections, sounds, lights, a floor covered in sand and a scattered objects that reminds us of the contradictions of space, culture and rituals that take place in the edge where the land and ocean meet.
This art installation is supported in part by SPRING/BREAK Art Show, and we want to thank Lincoln Center Education and The Digital and Interdisciplinary Art Practice (DIAP) MFA program at The City College of New York for its support.
Lionel Cruet was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico and received his Bachelor in Fine Arts from La Escuela de Artes Plásticas en Puerto Rico and a Masters in Fine Arts from CUNY - The City College of New York. He was the recipient of the Juan Downey Audiovisual Award in 2013 at the 11th Media Arts Biennale at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago, Chile. In 2015 had a solo show, Lionel Cruet: In Between, Real and Digital with Bronx River Art Center in New York. His artwork have been part of notable exhibition such as SuperReal: Alternative Realities in Photography and Video at El Museo del Barrio in New York, Colonial Comfort at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico and the Sound Art Fair (Feria de arte sonoro) at Sala de las Artes, Universidad de Sagrado Corazón in Puerto Rico among others. In 2017 his work will be exhibited at the AIM Biennale, The Bronx Museum of the Arts and his projects has been published by Made in Mind Magazine, POSTmatter, designboom. His work focuses in subjects of geopolitics crossing metaphors nature and technology, using audio-visual material, performance, and installations.
SPRING/BREAK Art Show,
BKLYN IMMERSIVE
MAY 6 to 14
from 7- 10PM
City Point BKLYN
300 Flatbush Ave. Extension
Brooklyn, NY
Paramnesia, solo show by Sebastian Vallejo
April 21 - August 28, 2016
Antiguo Arsenal de la Marina Española, San Juan, PR
Part of the Visual Arts Program of the Puerto Rico Culture Institute
Curator, Sofía Reeser del Río
