Geographies of the Self
GEOGRAPHIES OF THE SELF
MARCH 25TH - MAY 27TH
CURATOR STATEMENT
Geographies of the Self follows mainly Bronx-based multidisciplinary artists who are exploring how imagery of the human form connect to an individual’s ancestry, and how they grapple with communities in diaspora. Artists ponder the land itself as personal as the body through various interpretations. They investigate community, immigrant and personal histories that meld to create new interpretations of self. Ritual and tradition are recontextualized with the artists own experience and interpretations for personal and communal relevancy. The imprint of
colonization, slavery, and genocide are ever-present in bodies and landscapes. The artists here interpret new reclamations of healing and empowerment and embrace a future that is informed by its history and re-imagines utopian futures.
Samantha Box dialogues with issues of accessibility and justice. Her photographs delve into the afro Caribbean diaspora communities use and understanding of indigenous plants of their ancestors. On the backdrop of colonization and near erasure of medicinal ancestral plant knowledge, Box embraced these traditions. She views the continuity of family and generational knowledge as an act of resistance. In Patricia Cazorla’s portraits she explores her identity as a Latinx queer Venezuelan/American. Her paintings include portraits of women at all stages in life, exploring the feminine aspects of life, age, culture, beauty, and gender. Through her work she navigates through the issues of Latino American immigration and migration in the United States. Maya Ciarrocchi works explores, “the excavation of vanished histories, themes rooted in Queerness, and the experience of her Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. Ciarrocchi investigates how displacement writes itself into generational consciousness by layering redrawn maps and architectural renderings of disappeared and imagined places.” Her piece reworks and recreates spaces for, “new, fantastical spaces that offer possibilities for healing and remembrance.” Her included cyanotype contains architectural schematics of “vanished buildings, maps of disappeared places, and decorative details from the interiors of destroyed synagogues.” The artist, Aiki mines the duality of her experience in works investigating the body and depictions of peoples of African American and Native ancestry. She employs signifiers and symbolism from both traditions to interpret her own experience. Francheska Alcántara works at the intersection of ritual and new understandings of traditions of Caribbean culture in the diaspora. Their film explores domestic life and life in the community, referencing culturally significant meanings. The artist documents everyday scenes, that meld into dreamlike sequences
with symbolic meaning. Alcántara looks to traditions and their evolution in the diaspora and individuals desires to hold fast and reclaim them for their own individual understandings of who they are. Katherine Miranda’s work focuses on their grandfather, who is their namesake. They are unraveling their grandfather’s narrative and the work reflects this investigation from mystery to knowing. Outlines appear ghostlike and signify Miranda’s ancestral history. Investigating memory through an exploration of family artifacts is the basis for this work, creating an imagined world of consumer packaging, letters, and imagery the artist creates a rich connection of symbolic imagery to their ancestorial relations.
Dauris Martinez investigates the cultural legacy of the Domincan Republic. The artist grapples with his identity through body images maniupulated through collage. Martinez uses multiple media in his sculptural works often incorporating text and symbolism. Birds have a dualtiy of meaning and reference notions of sexuality from the artists cultural background. Both body and landscape in his works are deconstructed and are built anew in a sureal mode inhabiting box formations as 3-D works. In the series, The ache for home lives in all of us, Tijay Mohammed delves into the themes of “home, identity, self-love, and appreciation through the complexities of the African and African American experiences.” The story of immigrants is explored through Tijay’s personal experience as an immigrant and more universal notions of immigration. He focuses on children who straddle both continents, similar to his own daughter’s experience born in the US. He reflects on the notion of “other” in the unites states and how this duality can sensitize to differences and lead to an acceptance and tolerance of issues of identity in all its forms. The artist is conscience in his materials to the climate crisis and utilizes recycled materials in his large-scale collages often referencing objects from everyday life.
Ruth Rodríguez-Guerrero focuses on her own Dominican American
experience and the influence of her mother and grandmother. Her sketch book in a glimpse into a rich internal dialogue and narrative that the artist continues to mine. She references her grandmothers experience in the textile industry, cooking traditions, notions of womanhood and body image. Ephemera from her grandmother surface in her works in a rich investigation of immigrant ancestry and domestic life. Her collages are a natural extension of her sketchbooks reference material and create a world of memories in visual language. Camille Eskell contextualizes her families Iraqi-Jewish and Indian cultural lineage through sculpture. Eskell’s piece, Useless Females: Don’t Stand There Like a Decoration is from Words of My Father, an offshoot of her series The Fez as Storyteller. She confronts patriarchal and gendered traditions and their influence on one’s thinking and awareness. Highly patterned, she connects the notion of the decorative between her art and of women’s value as merely decorative that pervaded her upbringing.
Symbolism, ritual, and family are intwined in these artists work. Layers of traditions surface in the consciousness of their works as they reflect on their experience in the diaspora. They honor their families, culture, and heritage in the act of engaging and not leaving behind the richness of their ancestors and their experiences but by making it their own. Through the body and the landscape, they grapple with joyful and painful outcomes of their lineage. These brave pieces confront what it means to be a bridge from your ancestry, and culture to your present-day diaspora experience and the ways in which one can integrate and allow them to inform who you are. Uniquely their own narrative, these artists meld the past into their visual expression and inspire deep explorations of one’s own culture, family, traditions, and experience however painful and exclusionary they may be.