Nuevos Colores

About

Comprising site-specific installations, sculptures, paintings, works on paper, and photographs, the works reference a Cuban socio-political context and cultural background, particularly addressing themes such as oppression, yearning, dichotomies, and alternate realities.

To enter the exhibition, visitors pass underneath a site-specific installation by Arlés del Rio, La necesidad de otros aires(2015). Multi-colored, elongated snorkels hang just out of reach, demonstrating the visceral yearning for what lies beyond and initiating an experience of the physical and psychological boundaries that surround the island of Cuba. Holding up a pie-pan embroidered with thread and beads in her self-portrait photograph, Constelaciones (2010), Aimée García expresses her longing to be transported from the everyday and mundane to the infinite. In Roberto Fabelo’s painting, Ensimismado (2015), a pink tongue wraps around its fly covered head filling the opposite ear, referencing the festering of containment and the need for outside information. Ariamna Contino’s hand-cut, meticulously layered three-dimensional paper images contrast the paper’s inherent fragility with the subject matter, deadly weapons used to commit mass murder. Roberto Diago’s paintings and installation sculptures likewise allude to violence and human oppression, addressing slavery and the scars left by these human atrocities. The mixed media installation piece El paisaje y su dueño(2010) by Manuel Mendive depicts mythological and other dimensional creation stories from his native Afro-Cuban religion.

Full artist list: Lidzie Alvisa, Abel Barroso, Elizabet Cerviño, Ariamna Contino, Arlés del Rio, Roberto Diago, Roberto Fabelo, Aimée García, Manuel Mendive, Jorge Otero, Carlos Quintana, Ernesto Rancaño, Esterio Segura, Stainless, Rachel Valdés Camejo