Rupture/Ruptura
Curated by Gabrielle Tillenburg
Artists in Rupture/Ruptura responded to an open call for art, inviting works that address ruptures, whether they be negative, positive, alarming, disarming, an act of justice or injustice, or laden with potential. Artists were asked to envision rupture realistically, abstractly, socially, politically, emotionally, mentally, or materially. How do they envision disruption? This culminating exhibition engages their wide-ranging responses. Represented are a diversity of media--painting, photography, video, performance, ceramic, fiber, and more--and a diversity of geographical and cultural points of view across the Americas. The exhibition moves through four thematic vignettes: Women, Borders and Transnationalisms; Time and Place; and Embodiment and the Self. In the same way that disruption calls for us to break from traditional modes of categorization, the implementation of these themes is not intended to limit the scope of topics addressed by each work. Instead, the viewer is invited to draw multiple threads through the works and ponder the intersectional possibilities that rupture offers. Thus, you will find the artists' words alongside their work, and we invite you to consider the many disruptions they propose
Artists
Jennifer Albarracin Moya, Susan Alvarez, Gerardo Castro, Xuxin Gonzalez, Katty Huertas, Aleka Medina,
Gabriela C. Mejias Jaramillo, Sue Montoya, Christal Pérez, Kiara Rivera, Eric Rivera Barbeito,
MichaelAngelo Rodriguez, Monica Sorelle, Raqeebah Zaman
Please note this exhibition contains some depictions of nudity. The exhibition is best viewed on a desktop.
Women
In paint, collage, ceramic, performance, and digital media, artists Gerardo Castro, Kathy Bruce, Gabriela C. Mejias Jaramillo, Aleka Medina, and Katty Huertas prompt us to examine how women disrupt tradition, rupture patriarchal structures, and break with sexual oppression; they explore violence as experienced by women, the bridges between generations of women, and the experiences of the Latin American immigrant woman.
Gerardo Castro
My series, The Good, the Wicked, and the Fabulous (Las Buenas, las Malvadas y las Fabulosas) honors Latina women who have resisted and RUPTURED traditional expectations of what women can and should do and aims to inspire women with the courage to break free from the chains of limiting belief patterns and societal or religious conditioning that have traditionally kept women suppressed and unable to see their true beauty and power.
Sylvia del Villard was a celebrated Afro-Puerto Rican activist, dancer, choreographer, actress, spokesperson for Afro-Puerto Rican culture who fought for the equal rights of the Black Puerto Rican artists. She traced her Yoruba roots to the people of Nigeria and lived a “blackness” that was truly pure within the context of her being. In 1968, Sylvia founded the "El Coqui" theater which was recognized as the most important authority of Black Puerto Rican culture. Her voice proclaimed and exalted the Black Majesty that lived in her and in all Puerto Ricans and lived her life protecting our African heritage and did it with extraordinary passion.
July 2019, Puerto Ricans of all political ideologies, classes and ages converged for massive marches on the governor’s mansion in Old San Juan, calling for the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosselló. The chants that would ring through the streets of Old San Juan was sung, to the rhythmic beat of the most glorious of all protests the “cacerolazo” - people banging on cooking pots “cacerolas” and pans.
In Judeo-Christian iconography, saints are shown praying as they are ceremoniously crowned by White angels, I re-invented that narrative. Saint Cacerola incarnate, a symbol of resistance a badass woman protester projecting strength of symbolic imagination as she’s crowned by three mystic angels of color.
Sylvia del Villard (The Black Majesty), 2019
oil on paper, mixed media
24" x 6'
La Lupe: A Queen Possessed, 2019
oil on paper, mixed media
24" x 6'
Coronation of Santa Cacerola, 2020
oil on paper, mixed media
24" x 6'
Kathy Bruce
Many of my collages explore archetypal female forms inspired by the Peruvian saints, historical figures, and 16th-century tapadas that I discovered in Peru during my early years as a Fulbright student scholar there--albeit with a contemporary view of women. "Tapadas" was the name designated to Limena women during the Viceroyalty of Peru and the early years of the Republic who wore shawls completely covering their body except for one eye. I find both the notion and the surreal image intriguing. The fashion was eventually outlawed by the Spanish authorities because it had a subversive effect on its intention--to protect and hide women's bodies. However, the incognito coverings gave women the license to express themselves freely in society thus leading to flirtatious promiscuity.
The other women prevalent throughout the history of art in Peru are the saints--for example Santa Rosa de Lima, and la Sarita Colonia whose stories and images permeate contemporary Peruvian material culture in bizarre ways (key rings, bracelets, postcards, playing cards, etc.) and the (perhaps) lesser-known remarkable Latin American women heroines such as Manuela Saenz, Sor Juana one de la Cruz and Clorinda Matto de Turner. These are continuing sources of inspiration on exploring the themes of women--particularly in Latin America today.
La Tapada, 2019
collage
13" x 15 1/2"
From Series: Tapadas, Saints and other Heroines
![Classification II[24209].jpg](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/71d6fd_faf77b89be2b41f89fd1fffe3de4ab70~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_442,h_588,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/Classification%20II%5B24209%5D.jpg)
Classification II, 2021
collage
9 1.2" x 13 1/3"
From Series: Classifications
Winged Menina, 2012
collage
9 1/2" x 12"
From Series: Tapadas, Saints, and other Heroines
Gabriela C. Mejias Jaramillo
Exploro la identidad individual y colectiva como mujer basándome en experiencias y nociones opresivas sobre el cuerpo femenino y su sexualidad. Partiendo desde la figuración del cuerpo feminizado, busco abarcar la sexualidad en múltiples facetas, de manera que promueva el empoderamiento sobre el cuerpo propio como acto de liberación y despojo de hegemonías patriarcales.
Cinturones (1), 2020
ceramic
9" x 14.5" x 11"
Cinturones (2), 2020
ceramic
9.5" x 12" x 8"
Cinturones (3), 2020
ceramic
8.75" x 10.75" x 7.35"
Aleka Medina
Mi arte tiene que ver con procesos de sanacion intergeneracional, con un dialogo que se da entre mujeres. Tomo el dibujo, la instalación y el performance como medio para trabajar temas de sanción.
Creo mucho ir de lo individual a lo colectivo y regresar porque así es el ser humano. Por ser de una generación de post guerra, después de el conflicto armado en Guatemala que dura 36 años, mi trabajo se enfoca en problemáticas del presente. De violencia e injusticias, sistemas fallidos. Trabajo de forma individual y colectiva, con grupos de mujeres en especial, desde la alegría y la rabia, organizar trabajos que pueden llegar a ser de gran escala.
Cuando mi tía y mi madre mueren, me doy cuenta de la necesidad de afrontar hacia algo intrínseco que era mi sanción personal y cómo eso afectaba generacionalmente. En la pandemia por el confinamiento, y la falta de espacios y recursos inicio en el performance como nuevo medio. Pero siguiendo los mismos temas.
desvergonzarse, 2021
videoarte
3:34
Producción: Fernanda Montenegro
Katty Huertas
My work is about social issues that deal with double standards, ownership, inequalities and gender. I mostly focus on my experience as an immigrant woman from Latin America. I’m interested in treating these important matters with the respect they deserve while at the same time giving them comical undertones that range from literal to conceptual.
I work with my own image and experience because it is what I know best, I believe the personal is the political hoping that my experiences might resonate with others. I also draw inspiration from folklore in an effort to make my culture known.
Drawn to figurative work, I enjoy creating work that's full of detail, easter eggs, and that is not limited to a single medium. Playing between analog and digital mediums I want to create a sense of magic in my work, inspired by magic realism.
Mountain Mother, 2020
acrylic on laser-cut wood and digital media
43" x 27"
Mountain Mother Book, 2020
mixed media
27" x 16" x 9"
Mountain Mother Type Specimen, 2020
digital painting and animation
0:32
Borders and Transnationalism
Digital photography and multimedia works from artists Jennifer Albarracin Moya, Juan Carlos Escobedo, and Raqeebah Zaman expose the disruption of borders, migration, and transnationalism; and how communities, personas, and spaces defy, confront, and cope with the breaks that distance, time, and borders create. Their works invite the viewer to contemplate the occupation of liminal space.
Collective hope, 2019
digital photography
12.5" x 15.625"
Jennifer Albarracin Moya
We are all Bolivian and are of Andean descent. The genesis of our relationship with the U.S. varies with each of us. While some of us were born in the U.S., others immigrated here as kids, like me. Despite the nuances in our stories, we still go through the same motions of always being pushed back and forth between worlds. Like many immigrants and children of immigrants, the experience of barely being able to balance it all is universal. This tension is what I wanted to capture in my photos.
My friends and I are a support system, often sharing and advising each other on issues that arise from coming in and out of multiple worlds. They are complicated, sticky, and conjure anger and sadness, but also love and beauty.
I wanted to pay homage to the modern and traditional, harkening back on the issue of balance between generations. I use silhouettes, cuts, and colors similar to what a cholita would wear but with a modern look. The clothes themselves then become a metaphor for how we are trying to make a new space for ourselves while preserving our roots.
I used the color pink to represent feminity and brown for the earth. In Andean culture, there is a deep respect for Pachamama, mother earth. The color gold is also a motif. It signifies the value system that sharply contrasts with western ideas of gold. Through colonization, Bolivia and other Latin American countries have had their resources stripped away. In Bolivia's case, tons of silver was stolen. Despite it all, I wanted to show in these photos that we persist. No amount of gold or silver could compare to what we value the most, community and earth's gifts.
Trauma and liberation, 2019
digital photography
12.5" x 15.625"
Celebration Mistura, 2019
digital photography
12.5" x 15.625"
Juan Carlos Escobedo
My work explores my identity as a bordertown brown person from a lower-class background in a predominantly “white” structured world. I have chosen to attach selected works “HouseMan” series. These series explore my background as a lower-class Mexican-American, residual class/race shame, psychological homelessness, and liminality.
The common thing that these objects, along with the rest of my art practice, is my commitment to cardboard as a material for making. This originated in graduate school, which was a predominantly white, middle class(and above) institution located in Boston, MA—a stark difference from the very brown, Spanish speaking border town of El Paso, TX which I am from. I began using this material because of its availability, practicality, and zero cost. As I used it more, people reacted by overly questioning its presence, encouraged me to eradicate its brown identity, or were simply offended by it. Something that peers using “traditional” materials were not scrutinized for. Similarly, during my time as a grad student, my identity as a poor brown person was met with similar reactions to the cardboard—my citizenship was questioned, I was encouraged to diminish my “brownness”, and people felt uncomfortable discussing my socio-economic background. This put my identity into perspective and forced me to dissect the implications of my presence in spaces that were not originally aimed at people with my background.
After graduating, there was a time of re-assimilation into my original hometown in which I was confronted with the deficiencies I grew up in. Years after, I still struggled with confusion and anger over shortcomings of my socioeconomic background and microaggressions towards the color of my skin. I developed the idea of HouseMan, a creature that somehow finds itself in a new world and uses his homes as a protection. These homes, which were originally a source of comfort, become a burden because of the negative connotations their appearance exudes. Beneath HouseMan’s façade exists a body which is an amalgamation of the different components of his original environment. HouseMan’s presence in a foreign environment causes a psychological and physical volatility which results in an ungrounded being searching for a “steady” space to exist in.
Originally, I thought of HouseMan’s existence as something to pity because he would never have the ability to identify himself or acclimate to a space. Now I see him as fortunate because the ephemerality of his identity allows him to enter and exit spaces at will. It also allows him to collect components for his opulent anatomy. Houseman exists in a place of constant tension but also a place “where the missing or absent pieces can be summoned back, where transformation and healing may be possible, where wholeness is just out of reach but seems attainable" (Gloria Anzaldua, Light in the Dark 2015)
This is HouseMan. He just stepped out of time., 2018
collage
8.5" x 11"
This is HouseMan. He finally found something., 2021
collage
8.5" x 11"
This is HouseMan. He's searchin'., 2021
video
1:07
Raqeebah Zaman
Photographs of a heavily Guyanese diasporic neighborhood with digitally painted mirages overlaid; physically painted versions soon to come.
These photographs were taken months prior to the painted mirages which come as afterthoughts as I make sense of the images. Multiple versions using the same photograph are created as I contemplate a balance between existing aesthetics and the imagined.
The painted mirages here are through the spectacle of a young immigrant - myself - whose connections, memories, and histories of Guyana are informed mostly through oral stories of familial immigrants who left at an older age, memories of a visitation to Guyana in my youth, and my hometown Little Guyana, New York - all of which are my inspirations of which are heavily influenced by nature and landscape.
Little Guyana, a neighborhood sprung out of the desire for a community culturally [and for some, racially] similar to back home, disrupted the previously dominant Italian neighborhood of Richmond Hill, New York. Instances of white flight occurred as Guyanese migrants and immigrants began to make it their home from the late 1970's; the neighborhood then erupted into what is now known as Little Guyana. In these pieces, growth as a result of economic migration and the promise of a better life is questioned. While some eventually succeeded in America, the imagined gold-paved roads of the United States were proven to be wrong for others.
These pieces are created through the lens of the motherland as a tropical haven. Somewhat childish in immediate perspective, the pieces question the rupture from the motherland and how it may or may not have balanced out access to education and other social factors, as a new American as opposed to a Guyanese. Was leaving Guyana the better choice or would have staying eventually brought a more satisfying life?
Blackwater Creek at Sunset near West Indian Market, 2021
digital photography with digital paint
15.16" x 10.11"
From the Tracks We Grew; Lefferts on Liberty; Victoria Amazonica at Sunset Version 5, 2021
digital photography with digital paint
15.16" x 10.11"
"Reflections of a False El Dorado: Ah How Many Barrel Meh Can Afford Fah Sen' Back Home?", 2021
digital photography with digital paint
15.16" x 10.11"
Time and Place
Conversations on borders and transnationalisms call on us to consider time and place. Eric Rivera Barbeito explores disruption in history and between two places in their political relationship. Sue Montoya looks to memory and place, both real and imagined. Monica Sorelle photographs place affected by disruptions such as climate change and gentrification, and Xuxin Gonzalez uses the medium to discuss the histories of communities and figures whose generative disruptions left visible marks on physical space photographed by the artist.
Eric Rivera Barbeito
My practice documents Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the United States, addressing the cultural, political, and economic aspects of said relationship and its implications on smaller, more personal levels. Through a multidisciplinary approach that utilizes sculpture, painting, drawing, and digital media, my work focuses on the portrayal of concepts such as designed inefficiency, inequality, imperialism, colonialism, and to an increasing extent climate change. It is a process that sprouts with prickles of cynicism and a consistent hum of anguish, into a reflection of the contradictory states of being Puerto Rican.
Recently, I have been investigating ways in which the idea of Manifest Destiny has been and continues to be an underlying driver of United States foreign policy, and how, through its exportation of its grotesquely resource-guzzling military-industrial complex, it continues to precipitate the severity of climate change, and the intensity of natural disasters. This results in a double-tiered wave of violence of global proportions through the imposition of “American” values; the unyielding hunt of capital growth at the expense of all else, even self-inflicted doom.
Tanquesito (M1A1), 2021
mixed media
24" x 3.5" x 13.5"
Vista Pública, 2021
acrylic, pencil, and charcoal on paper
11.75" x 9"
Vieques, 2018
fir, walnut, pine, acrylic, map of Vieques
34" x 6.5" x 6.5
Sue Montoya
In my work, I examine how the built environment is apportioned, utilized, and perceived. Development perpetuates the seemingly endless cycle of extraction, construction, and gentrification at the cost of local communities. The geopolitics and history of places emerge throughout my work in the form of photographs, sculptures, videos, and zines. My research draws on architecture, feminism, ecology, and labor (physical and emotional) as means to investigate systems of power and the production of space on the individual and the collective. I hope to reveal the economic, political, and historical factors that contribute to the exploitation, allocation, dispossession, and perception of people and land.
Photographic imagery of landscapes with drywall, wood, and barro de Oaxaca create unique constructions that highlight the connection between place, materials, and memory.
Revisiting objects and landscapes from places in my imagination and past, I explore the transient memory of the mountainous Honduran landscape and then explore like forms found in the temporary man-made mounds in Miami. The images mounted onto slabs of drywall--decaying as they move through the world are paired with a series of photographs and ceramic works.
Valle I, Tabla Roca, Lluvia y Llantos, 2021
drywall, archival print y barro de oaxaca and fire red clay
dimensions variable
Valle II, Lluvia y Llantos construction I, 2021
archival print y barro de oaxaca and fire red clay
5.5" x 8"
Under Construction in Tatumbla from Camino a Valle de Angeles y Tatumbla Series, 2021
archival print
5.5" x 8"
Monica Sorelle
My work explores alienation and displacement and preserves cultural traditions within Miami & the Caribbean with a focus on the African & Latin diasporas that reside there. Using storytelling, photography, and video, I examine the marginalized through a cinematic lens, delving into both the tangible and the speculative.
Influenced by spaces and landscapes that are in flux, at risk due to sea-level rise or redevelopment, my work serves as an archive — contending with that which has always been present and bringing it to light to be seen or heard in ways previously left unexplored.
The Writing on the Wall (Goodbye Little Haiti), 2015
archival inkjet print
11" x 14"
Lakou (I), 2019
archival inkejt print
11" x 14"
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Twa Zom Fo Botanica, 2015
archival inkjet print
11" x 14"
Xuxin Gonzalez
I use photography to pose questions, learn, and share information about my surroundings. The images become tangible answers to find the sites that converge at the intersection of history, policy, and space. In turn, I present these sites as spaces of resistance to the erasure of marginalized histories.
By imposing a new narrative we can rupture and dislodge Selective Traditions which Raymond Williams refers to as a process where intentionally selective versions of society’s past are emphasized as “tradition” and others are negated. The past is then used to privilege, explain, support, and justify actions in the present. It also points towards a future that maintains the social and economic status quo. Yet, they are also vulnerable to historical recovery and opposition positions, particularly by marginalised groups.
I center those experiences and voices being excluded from official narratives by reframing the sites being photographed as spaces of empowerment and pride. With Forced Transition & Resistance, I present the site of the statue as a space where we talk about the legacy racialized policy had on the Latinx community of San Salvador and the active resistance the community participated in.
Mexicans forged an alternative culture in which bootlegging operations figured prominently as symbols of resistance and community... Corona's most prominent female bootlegger, Carmen Ayala, driven to bootlegging by financial circumstances, faced arrest and six months in the county jail. After she pleased guilty, the judge denied her parole because "she refused to disclose her supply of liquor to the officers."
Taken from: José M. Alamillo, Making Lemonade out of Lemons: Mexican Labor and Leisure in a California Town, 1880-1960, University of Illinois Press, 2006.
Crown Town, 2021
digital photography
16" x 20"
WE ARE RESILIENT AND WE THRIVE
Inside this shed is the last remaining wall of the Trujillo Adobe, in a once prosperous Latinx settlement called La Placita. Recently the city of Riverside was going to approve an influx of industrial warehouses around the historic structure, an area that has a history of being willfully neglected. The community has come together and voiced their opposition, those plans have been put on hold while the city updates their Northside Specific Plan, which will be the guiding document in what the future look and feel of this community will be. It is through the power of community and collectively voicing our needs that we can manifest a more just and equitable future. That's not to say it's an easy task or that opposing forces with money and power won't try to derail, chip away, or flat out oppose those needs. Also, history has shown this fight isn't new to the area: from the creation of industrial citrus agriculture, the postwar military and manufacturing industries, to neoliberal globalization that's created the current logistics industry complex. It's always been about money and power, but there has also always been resistance and resilience.
Mural by: @rodriguez.187
Trujillo Adobe, 2021
digital photography
16"x20"
Forced Transition & Resistance highlights all the elements normally found in my photography. The photo shows the statue of Eliza Tibbetts who is known as successfully growing the first two hybrid Washington navel orange trees in Riverside, California, which contributed to the rapid expansion of the citrus industry in the region. The mythology built around the history of the Washington Navel Orange and Eliza Tibbetts hides the historical elements which also caused the displacement of many long time residents of the valley, including a local indigenous population, Mexican ranch communities, and a thriving community of Hispanos who migrated from New Mexico, when the valley was still Mexico named San Salvador.
Forced Transition & Resistance, 2021
digital photography
20" x 16"
Embodiment and the Self
Christal Pérez, Kiara Rivera, MichaelAngelo Rodriguez, and Susan Alvarez present varying methods of exploring embodiment and the self, disrupting traditional figurative modes of representing personhood. In multimedia works, Pérez disrupts the space between humans and objects and spaces. Rivera's fiber-based works embody psychological traces and her own labor. Rodriguez captures unexpected traces of the self in his photography, disrupting conceptions of self-portraiture. In acrylic, pen, and ink Alvarez contemplates the disruptions in her life path, as well as the ultimate disruption--death, as a mirror to life. This closing exhibition vignette invites the viewer to contemplate how disruption figures into the life of the individual.
Christal Pérez
These multidisciplinary works entitled, Cruisin’ down Cesar Chavez, Nopal en la Cara and Malabar and Soto all find alternatives to using a figurative representation, and rather seek modes to find surrogates for memory, be it textual, through a ghostly automotive sculpture or via a cactus skin, to antagonize history and identity. Further, these works attempt to find alternatives to a human embodiment, and unsettle the boundary of human and object, in a manner that frees the Brown body the burden of representation.
Cruisin' down Cesar Chavez, 2019
welded metal, white sheets, fan, sound
dimensions variable
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napal en la cara, 2019
poly-urethane cast from cactus in East Los Angeles, rocks from Los Angeles, twine rope
dimensions variable
Kiara Rivera
The physicality of tension is described as the opposition of two external forces: stretching, constricting, and thinning. To define a psychological form of tension would be a process of recollection and reflection. I use materials such as clay, metal, and natural fiber combining fiber techniques and industrial processes to create bonds of fragility, balance, and resilience.The repetitive, ritualistic nature of labor-intensive processes become a moment of solace and self reflection. The relationship between the object and myself are embedded within the methods of production that are reliant on duration, sequence, and memory. Through material manipulation and abstraction I create an ephemeral archive of sensibility.
Aquarelle 03, 2020
cotton and synthetic fibers
54" x 28"
Cuadrícula de Cenizas, 2021
porcelain, Cottolin hand-woven, glass, copper powder
36" x 6-" woven, 12" x 12" glass sheets, 24" x 36" porcelain cast
MichaelAngelo Rodriguez
This is not just what I see outside this is also what I see in myself, explains how I describe the photographs that form my work. When I start to think about my identity, I acknowledge that my experiences have shaped me and the work I make. These photographs display early dreams and are created as metaphor for my personal experiences. I think of sports as one of my foundations. The game is the stage and practicing sports has created the way I watch myself move. My actions with a camera mind looking outward while one eye is looking in.
Man with a Rubber Plant, 2020
archival pigment print
13" x 19"
High Ground Por Si Tsunami, 2020
archival pigment print
19" x 13"
Susan Alvarez
Inspired from childhood cartoons to long walks on the beach in the moonlight, my work involves sculpting with assorted materials to create visualizations of the self through ecosystems. These select works diagram disruptions of the conscious in recent environments I've experienced. I consider making art, much like meditation, to be preparation for death. In turn, its mirror is a celebration for life and its blemishes.
Pour Me Your Glass, 2020
acrylic and pen
10" x 7"
Cat's Castle, 2021
acrylic, pen, and ink
30" x 23"
In Your Room, 2021
marker and ink
9" x 12"
Curated by Gabrielle Tillenburg
Artists websites, in order of appearance, where available:
https://www.kathybruceartist.com/
https://www.instagram.com/struggling_gaby/
ttps://alekamedina.wixsite.com/alekamedina/entra-la-aguja-y-deja-una-huella
Malabar Street and Soto, 2019
video
1:45