POSTPONED: America's Crossroads: Six Contemporary Photographers in Dialog

America’s Crossroads

The OAS AMA | Art Museum of the Americas announces America’s Crossroads, an exhibition opening at the OAS F Street Gallery (1889 F Street, NW, Terrace Level) featuring six artists in a visual dialog. Carlos Bautista Avila (Mexico), Rene Campos Navarro (Mexico), Luis Delgado (United States-Mexico), Gisele Martins (Brazil), Cirenaica Moreira (Cuba), and Diana Ramirez Lopez (Mexico) provoke through their work mixed responses as they reflect, manipulate, rethink, and question on a local level who we are in the Americas.

Gisele Martins is a photographer from Sao Paulo, Brazil. Her series Look I Come from That Place, Far a Way chronicles a syncretic place where members of two religions share proximity with the same propose: worshiping their own God. The Sicilian Roman Catholic Church located in the district of Bixiga in Sao Paulo opens its door, to the larger Afro Brazilian descendant community to celebrate their art and the Candomblé religion, inside a sacred building, filling the benches with a mixed-race patronage.

Luis Delgado, in his series Enigma, presents syncretic beings made of found representations of iconic body parts. He approaches his surrealistic ensembles with humor, using fragmentation and replacement body parts to convey human emotion. To raise the old question: who are we?

Cirenaica Moreira, in her series Letters from the Inxilio, infers the melancholy of a never-ending diaspora. We can recognize many parts of the Americas where migration has become a way of life, with families and friends spread around the world. Her works address an inner exile, the solitude of both the migrant and those left behind. Her images evoke the scenes of a play, each acting as nonverbal testimonies.

Carlos Bautista Avila, in his series Cupulas, brings heaven and earth closer to one another. Heaven is depicted inside of the cupulas in the cathedral as well as in other churches: Virgen del Carmen, Virgen de la Merced, De las Rosas, San Agustin, and San Jose in his native Morelia Michoacán, Mexico. Each of these similarly beautiful places with different Catholic saints and virgins invites the viewer to communicate with God through an intermediary.

Rena Campos Navarro, in his series Windows to the Past, merges past and present of iconic colonial buildings in his native Morelia Michoacán. His composed images invite the viewer to witness the cityscape with a dual consciousness, that the places that we occupy today have been occupied before.

Diana Ramirez Lopez, in her series Juegos de Canicas (Marble Game), focusses her camera inward, taking in to account her own subconscious and childhood. Creating an imaginary world that just about anyone could relate to: that of childhood games. These imaginary personal worlds bring to mind Jorge Luis Borges’s The Aleph. The viewer can see the universe, past and present, and no two people will see it in quite the same way.

The people in the Americas share a common history that is manifested in local terms, becoming a conglomerate of different cultures of an ever-dynamic changing history of native Americans, settlers, and migrants.

Image:

Cirenaica Moreira (Cuba)

La Industrial, lavandería Habana de la serie Metálica, 1998-1999

Digital photograph, archival pigment print on premium luster photo paper