Identity/Polemics: Latino Artist's Conversations

GALA Hispanic Theatre

April 12 - May 6, 2007

GALA Hispanic Theatre, in conjunction with curator Teresa Diaz, presents Identity/Polemics: Latino Artist’s Conversations, an exhibition featuring three Latino artists whose work encompasses modern political and social conceptualizations relevant to the Latino experience. The exhibition contextualizes GALA’s premiere of the critically acclaimed play Elliot: A Soldier’s Fugue (Elliot, fuga para un soldado), which explores the dichotomy between Puerto Rican and U.S. cultural identity as well as generational convergence and conflict.  Identity/Polemics is part of an ongoing visual program to give Latino artists a home to share their experience with the community. All thirteen works of art and their didactics will be on display April 12 – May 6 in GALA’s reception area and available for viewing Thursdays through Saturdays from 6pm until 10pm and Sundays from 2pm until 6pm.  Please contact GALA or the exhibition’s curator to schedule a viewing at other times.

About the Exhibition

This collection of paintings, photographs and digital images represents a critical development in the DC contemporary art scene, as it exposes themes of socio-political disenchantment, feelings of manipulation, desire, acculturation, dreams, and romance through a Latino perspective rarely witnessed in the Washington’s galleries and museums.  The selected artists were chosen because of their work’s powerful content as well as their resonance with the play’s themes¾i.e. war, the military, Puerto Rican nationalism, and feelings of displacement.

Three representatives of the Latino Diaspora, Maria Dominguez, Jose Piedra and Antonio Muñoz, reveal their preoccupations with contemporary issues through digital media and painting by manipulating images from mainstream media and transposing them into familiar settings, creating a dialogue between spectator and creator.

Alfonso Muñoz

An exemplary visual artist, Alfonso Muñoz is a true “renaissance man.” At the age of 13, Muñoz, a talented child, became the assistant to the Italian artist Antonio Loro.  There, he acquired his skills in various printing techniques ranging from woodcut to calligraphy, which prepared him for the University of Puerto Rico and later obtaining his degree from the Art Institute of Chicago.

Muñoz, Puerto Rican by birth, has spent twenty years working as an artist in Chicago, New York and Paris. After organizing Roger Capron’s retrospective in his own gallery in New York City, Muñoz accepted an apprenticeship in Capron’s ceramic studio.  Ceramics have been the base of his work since.

Reminiscent of Bogie-Bacall films, the carefully staged “Barbie dolls” in his oeuvre pose like actors in miniature theatrical stages. Using found objects, vintage doll props and his skill with clay for his sceneries, Muñoz “snap shots” the drama at an unusual angle –as if seen through a peep hole. With meticulous detailing and a talent for satyr, Muñoz amuses us with these surrealistic settings and titles. In his “September 12 Shopping,” a New Yorker dressed in Christian Dior and equipped with a gas-mask, machine gun and purse, delights us with dark humor.  In a more ironic scene, “American Bar” stages a disappointed-looking Abraham Lincoln as a bartender in front of a dismembered American flag and behind an all-observing woman’s stare. Evident in these examples, Muñoz’ reveals the fragility of comedy, satyr and reality.

More about the artist

http://www.alfonsony.com/

Maria Dominguez

Maria Dominguez is a Puerto Rican artist who migrated with her family to New York City at the age of four. After a fine arts degree from the School of Visual Arts, she began her career as a muralist for the Citiarts mural workshop, which later led her to a commission with the Italian government to create an installation for the Triennale de Milano.

Her training as a muralist is evident in the repetitive patterning found in her large-scale work. Using feminine colors such as bright pinks, strident yellows, and creamy purples as backgrounds and super-imposing complimentary colored flower and figure ensembles, Dominguez creates wallpaper-like prints of patterns that can be reproduced in infinite ways to resemble Rococo brocades and damasks. At a glance, one notices the flatness of the figures and their garments as if girls at play had cut out fabric calico to clothe their dolls. Looking closer, one recognizes that the artist used her self-portrait on all the dolls. Altering the scale or size, Dominguez widened or narrowed her body’s dimensions to resemble one of many ultra-thin, long-legged models in our contemporary media.

Diva (dē´va) n. prima donna, goddess

The legendary “diva” is not only a mythical symbol of magnificence and sensuality, but an inspiration to those who lack luster and conventional good looks. A mystical creature, a “diva” counterbalances her masculine qualities with her femininity and plays with the viewer’s perception of what beauty should be.  In this series, Dominguez celebrates divas. Dripping with glamour, attitude and style, the prototypes she depicts seemingly flaunt their beauty and self-assurance in creative configurations alternating with floral silhouettes and arrangements.    With her digitized magic, it only takes “a little nick here, and a little tuck there” to enhance her “idyllic” body and reveal a delicate erotic image of herself –a true “diva.”

More about the artist

http://mariadominguez.com/

Jose Piedra

Jose (Pepe) Piedra was born in Casma, Peru, home to the most ancient archeological site in Peru. Because of its historical and spiritual significance and wonderful location on the coast of Peru, Casma has always held a reputation as a cradle of inspiration for artists, writers and philosophers, hence Piedra’s nature. Piedra arrived in the United States a learned visual artist with a degree from the National School of Fine Arts in Lima, and now has become a successful artist and art teacher in a Montessori school in Maryland.

Piedra’s paintings are reminiscent of provincial life in Casma, Peru, in which isolation, purity and solemnity are juxtaposed with a longing for adventure and discovery.  They reflect his continual introspection of conflicting feelings as an expatriate and an immigrant -evident in the titles, themes, and symbolism of the objects depicted in his work.

As a multidisciplinary artist, Piedra expresses his inner urges with painting, music and poetry and thus, he enlightens us with his very lyrical transcendent creations. “Resistencia Latina (Latino Resistance),” an homage to the American-Hispanic race, reveals his longing for resistance to American Imperialism, where swans represent the “American way-of-life” and lure us with their beauty and sensuality. However, while enjoying these pleasures, the anaconda, representing danger, is always present and awaiting a careless move in order to attack. Other symbols Piedra creates such as the egg represent the incubation of the Latino presence in this land, ready to hatch and become a majority; the owl, a vigilant creature representing wisdom and knowledge, alerts the lizard, a symbol for the Latino immigrant, of present dangers, but, if hungry, will compete with the lemur, another predator hanging high from the branches, to snatch a prey or two; and the bell, a symbol for warning, alerts us of dangers. 

With a metaphorical approach, Piedra uses the Red Man as an alter ego –a humane conscience, a jocular surprise for the spectator, an instigator striving for peace and truth- to give the spectator a momentary divergence between reality and fantasy. The ladder, a metaphor for superiority, evolution, and the striving for perfection that humans long for, inasmuch as the number 7 -a cabala- is a part of Piedra’s magical world.

While “Stop War” and “Secrets” denote a more explicit interpretation of Piedra’s political agenda, his use of collage with newspaper headline cuttings deflect the formal subject while using the foreground as the background, and vice versa, creating symbiotic shapes that become one and many at once. Thus, by using negative space as positive space and words and symbols in the same surface, he creates a narrative that becomes an exemplary characteristic of Piedra’s dialect.

More about the artist

http://www.pepepiedra.com/es

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