GALLERY OPENING: Esperanza Mayobre, Thursday, September 14th, 4:30 to 6:00pm
In celebration of Latin American Heritage Month, the Westchester Community College Fine Arts Gallery is pleased to present: Esperanza Mayobre: I cannot connect nostalgia with the current reality.
The opening reception for Esperanza Mayobre and Latin American Heritage Month kick-off event is Thursday, September 14, 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm. All are welcome.
Artist’s Gallery Talk: Wednesday October 4, 11:00 am – 1:00 pm
Esperanza Mayobre was born in Venezuela, and currently lives in Brooklyn. She describes her work as “an ongoing investigation of urban problems in cities as contradictory as Caracas and New York: where I am from, where I live.”
Her work employs a variety of visual formats to explore themes of cultural displacement, and to “question problems that in the most part have no answers.” In one series, titled Postcards from Venezuela, she uses postcards (photograph on one side, written text on the other) to create a personal narrative that attempts to make sense of the incomprehensible events that were unfolding in her country, as she watched from abroad.
Another series, titled Antenas de Golindano, features images of old fans that inhabitants of her hometown converted into television antennas. The makeshift fans become a metaphor for human agency in a cultural landscape deprived of access to technology, while also hinting at the pervasive and pernicious role of the media as an instrument of state control.
A very different series of works uses architecture as a means of exploring urban landscapes as a contradictory process of simultaneous growth and decay. Titled Everybody knows cities are built to be destroyed, the series takes the form of large graphite and charcoal wall drawings (that viewers are invited to “erase”), or installations made out of foam core rectangles piled in heaps, looking like a collapsed version of a Sol Lewitt open-rectangle sculpture.
The exhibition runs from September 13 – November 22, 2017.