(Be)Longing

About

Nostalgia is a nexus for the works. Each one confronting and analyzing the complexity of nostalgia as a lingering sentiment and an underlying perspective to their history and identity. Through the image and object, they explore personal and universal confinements of living and being in the United States. 

The paintings by Jesus Benavente, confront themselves by means of splattered paint, contrasting color, and reactive acrylic on a disturbed surface. Their physical state prompts texts that describe moments of protest. Each statement is prescribed as a political stance and/or a self-identifier. Jesus describes these as miracles that are in-between coraje and sentido. Exemplified in the painting “You Live Here Now” which declares a moment of transition that shifts and scars our notion of home that may happen unwillingly or willingly. 

The installation, “How do you say Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals in Quechua?”, by Carlos Jiménez Cahua, reveals a translucent text of the menicent reality of political policy. Words that translate without meaning and translanguaging through the migration of Indigenous communities to the United States. The displacement that is nested from a colonized perspective then an imperial perspective and finally as an im(migrant).

In the work, “thuñi, ruinas, ruins” the sculptural fragments are brick, vaguely placing their likeness among the decay of the urban landscape. The bricks are carefully crafted as polygonal shapes sourced and studied from the Andean region. The forms trace what was once made by hands of Incan stonemasons but here Carlos’ bricks stand in form and spirit aching to connect structures and lives from Turtle Island to Abya Yala.

Through the exhibit a sequence of nostalgic markers, words and forms become objects. In the works by Bonam Kim, she gives us placement and distance of her own journey through objects that bear her memory and body. The staged suitcase, “The Story of a Stranger”, holds miniatures of her artwork, as an archive of her past, as she im(migrated) from Seoul to her present time in the United States. These precious objects create a middle point for nostalgia. In the bone-like structure, “Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down“ her own legs and body recalculates her own lengths and size, translating space from metric to imperial measurements tracing the similarities of home through the body and the new space. 

Finally, transcending from object to paper the works by Alva Mooses finds repose for body, memory, and land. You Enter Dancing/ There’s Always Sign, uses hydraulic pressure for the impressions on the ochre and charcoal mud color textured papers. The forms of a shoe sole and a corn cob overlay, emerging and receding. Along with the concrete casts they result in the traces of human presence that track across land –Alva refers to the practice of disguising foot tracks. Although referencing the paths that im(migrants) take across the Mexican/US border the imprints seem to remember the traces of footsteps across continents of the peoples fed by corn for a milenia.