2022: Two Solo Shows in the sunshine state

 

September 2022 SOLO EXHIBITION: INTERSTELLAR ASCENDANTS

Running from Friday, September 2nd through October 1st, 2022, at MIFA Gallery (Miami International Fine Arts), Interstellar Ascendants narrows the focus on the artwork that I created for my winter solo show, Interstellar Insulation. “Ascendants” doesn’t just refer to a specific horizon point in the zodiac—which is all-too-appropriate given the celestial imagery I use—but, more importantly for this exhibition’s context, it refers to ancestors and those in positions of preeminence. Both latter definitions speak to the roles that the non-space-related components in my drawings assume: representations of art, individuality, and enlightened thought that propel both technology and the humanities in equal measure. Ancient philosophy, classical sculpture, and Renaissance portraits converse and intertwine even more pointedly with astronauts, space shuttles, and technology in Interstellar Ascendants, ever tightening and fine-tuning the feedback loop between what we perceive as anachronistic, what we perceive as progressive, and, ultimately, what we know to be timeless.

 

Winter 2022 Solo Exhibition: Interstellar Insulation

Running from January 6th through March 11th, 2022, at the Switzer Gallery at Pensacola State College, Interstellar Insulation encapsulates a new direction in my artwork. After watching the first all-female spacewalk conducted on the International Space Station in October 2019, I began drawing astronauts after years of depicting my mother’s Cuban family. I drew my family in silverpoint—an anachronistic drawing media in which one uses a piece of silver wire in a stylus to draw, rather than a pencil—as its ephemeral, shimmering surface evokes the long-lost memories and narratives that I sought to capture in their faces.

I began to slowly see the conceptual parallels between my old and new bodies of work: immigrants and starsailors alike are strangers in strange lands, finding purpose in undertaking harrowing risks and propelling themselves into a vast unknown. In Interstellar Insulation, each drawing is an experiment, an exploration, both crystallizing and expanding upon those ideas. The astronauts depicted move from self-portraits to empty helmets to Old Master copies inhabiting their spacesuits.

My astronaut drawings range from fastidious silverpoint drawings on paper and panel to large mixed-media drawings on DuraLar. Both silverpoint, which is metallic, and DuraLar, a plastic film used to insulate spacesuits, better reflect the materials used in much of space exploration than a traditional pencil drawing. The silverpoint drawings are painstaking and time-consuming; the DuraLar drawings are visceral and ambitious in scale. Together, they present the opposite ends of my draftsmanship, a pendulum swinging from tender precision to gesture and energy, much as pendulums swing from science to art, from culture to technology, from the individual to the whole.

You could even say that each astronaut–whether a self-portrait, hidden behind the helmet, or an Old Master copy–is my own interpretation of Janus, a Roman god with two faces, one of which looked into the past while the other looked into the future. But my Januses come clad in a unique armor: they gain acumen by looking back into ancient philosophy and mythology, as much as they build momentum by looking forward into new frontiers. As each spacesuit or space shuttle insulates and protects the astronaut within, their fragility is also protected by their simultaneous points of view: hence the exhibition title, Interstellar Insulation. And, as each starsailor looks both backwards and forward, their innate curiosity and conviction–shaped by their own perspective, and yet by also shaped by a lineage of philosophy, mythology, culture, history, and art understood by all–is that which propels them through the nebulous, glimmering unknown into the present moment, right here in the middle.