The Voice That Reaches You

Work by Victor Cartagena, Julio Cesar Morales, Sofia Jarrin-Thomas and Josue Rojas
On View from November 29, 2008 - February 6, 2009
Opening Reception: November 29, 2008 at 7pm
Scheduled Open House Hours:
December 19, 7 - 10pm
December 20, 11am - 6pm
January 16, 7 - 10:00pm
January 17, 11am - 6pm


The Voice that Reaches You features three artists: Victor Cartagena, Julio Cesar Morales, and Josue Rojas; and one journalist: Sofia Jarrin-Thomas whose work documents and interprets contemporary immigration and deportation stories. Showcasing video, installation, audio and painted works, this is a show that encourages close study and promotes dialogue.

Josue Rojas reveals the experience of young Salvadoran deportees, known as “DPs” in his series Los Disappeared. Coming out of San Francisco's Mission school, Rojas creates large paintings, brightly colored and rife with symbols of ethnicity, nation, and immigrant experiences. Rojas illustrates the merging of cultures that arises when young immigrants are forced to return to a homeland they don't know, creating a hybrid North-Central American identity. Prints of his original paintings will accompany video interviews and a wall mural unique to Cara & Cabezas Gallery. Rojas' bright and expressive approach is a sharp contrast to the delicate watercolors of Julio Cesar Morales. Morales’ challenging images draw from photos taken by US Border Patrol of attempted immigrations along the US-Mexico border. Morales' diagrammatical approach is tempered by the luminous and transparent quality of his watercolor, lending a sense of desperation and irony to the works. One such image from this series presents a child, hidden in a piñata in the shape of a Powerpuff Girl.

Through his multimedia installation series Invisible Nation, Victor Cartagena also seeks to give a human face to the often dehumanized issue of undocumented immigration. His piece, Labor Tea, utilizes found passport photographs from the 1970s and 80s to address the necessary humanity of this issue; the images are housed in tea bags, a powerful critique of the negation of the histories, identities, and agencies of im/migrant laborers that make up much of this country's invisible labor force. The result is a haunting depiction of the nature of memory, and a strong attempt to reclaim stories that have been otherwise erased and ignored. These visual artists' interpretations will mirror the journalistic endeavors of Sofia Jarrin-Thomas. A freelance journalist with a specific interest in radio, Jarrin-Thomas established El Salvador's Oral Histories Project. The project focuses on the Civil War in El Salvador and the resulting disapora. Jarrin-Thomas recorded interviews with Salvadoran emigrants living in Massachusetts. These audio works provide an excellent complement to the artistic questions raised by Morales, Cartagena, and Rojas. These are stories that challenge and haunt their listeners, as they force us to recognize the human toll of a very politicized war.
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San Francisco Grown, Installation Views and Images

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History

It began as a conversation in a San Francisco arts venue in 2003. From disparate backgrounds, Paulo Acosta Cabezas, an entrepreneur originally from Central America, and Cara Megan Lewis, a visual artist with roots in the Midwestern United States, met on common ground through a shared interest in communicating ideas and sharing human stories through art exhibitions. In May 2004, Paulo opened Mamá Art Cafe and invited Cara Megan to contribute her skills to his exhibition program. She accepted the opportunity and has worked for his company for the last 4 years. Simultaneously, she continued to work at Fraenkel Gallery as a registrar and later went on to complete her Master's Degree in Curatorial Practice from the California College of the Arts.

Paulo often refers to the San Francisco venue as a laboratory, a space to cultivate a working relationship with his friends and family and explore the outcomes of this effort through the business of spices and coffee. Combining seemingly unrelated items, he brought together spices, coffee, and art. Coffee and spices are not only two of the oldest luxury items ever traded and formed the economic backbone of numerous ancient civilizations, but both also contribute to the basic building blocks of culture, food and drink. Communities form around food and the traditions and patterns surrounding cuisine. If a country's food, a basic necessity, is at the bottom of a country's cultural pyramid, fine art is at the top, being the ultimate expression of a country's political, social, economic and natural landscape.

Since the opening of Mamá Art Cafe, Paulo has exhibited the work of dozens of artists and has welcomed hundreds of musicians to perform. This cultural program, which fostered local artists’ practices and introduced a local audience to talent from Latin America, built a foundation from which Cara and Cabezas Contemporary would come into being. Kansas City was chosen as the location of the new gallery, first because it is Cara Megan’s hometown and secondly because it is a city rich in cultural history with growing support for artistic production. Just as Kansas City and San Francisco have been historically important intersections for the arts, where cultures have commingled to create new practices, Cara and Cabezas Contemporary aims to become a crossroads for art from Latin America and the United States.
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Cara and Cabezas Contemporary Opens in Kansas City

Cara and Cabezas Contemporary is pleased to open a gallery space in Kansas City’s River Market with the exhibition, San Francisco Grown: Photographs by Daniel Cheek, Amy Regalia, and Michael McCauslin. As an introduction to the geographical region in which he opened his first arts venue in 2004, Paulo Cabezas and Cara Megan Lewis, director and curator respectively, have selected images of Northern California made by photographers from the Bay Area where Cara and Cabezas have been working together for the last five years.


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San Francisco Grown: Photographs by Daniel Cheek, Amy Regalia, and Michael McCauslin

August 15 - September 27, 2008
opening reception on august 15 at 7pm

San Francisco Grown: Photographs by Daniel Cheek, Amy Regalia, and Michael McCauslin posits the work of three photographers whose environmental and urban landscapes illustrate the relationship between human and nature and distill moments at which the two face off. Bringing to the foreground what might otherwise go unnoticed, the images favor the inconspicuous as opposed to the obvious subject in the picture plane. As the title of the show suggests, the flora of the Bay Area is the apparent over-arching theme shared by the set of images. Yet it is the documentation of nature's expression in relation to and in spite of human's attempt to control it that makes these images provocative.

Michael McCauslin, Untitled, 2006

In a digital world, where technology has increased the production of images and speed of accessing them, Michael McCauslin invites the viewer to slow down in the act of looking. A modern-day street photographer with work methods inherited from turn-of-the-century photographers such as Eugene Atget, McCauslin captures the minute details within a city’s street. The tool of choice is a digital camera, which facilitates a deliberate and spontaneous capture. McCauslin’s images are fueled by an emotional response to his surroundings. McCauslin is a teacher and teacher’s mentor for the San Francisco Unified School District. This is McCauslin’s third exhibition organized by Cara and Cabezas Contemporary.

Amy Regalia, Leavings # 3

Amy Regalia stumbled upon the subject of her series, Leavings, while on a separate self-appointed assignment in San Jose, California. The attention to craft employed by the creators of these pre-mulch piles of yard waste attracted Regalia’s eye. In an approach similar to that of Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose work classifies buildings of the same function, Regalia set out to make portraits of these organic refuse piles. In her process, Regalia paid careful attention to keeping certain factors consistent throughout the series, such as her distance from the sidewalk. Seemingly simple street-side scenes open up a complex layering of information about the lives of the residents, their practices, and what lies beyonc each fence. Regalia studied at California College of the Arts and has exhibited at San Francisco Camerawork, Southern Exposure, and the Oliver Arts Center.

Daniel Cheek, Pinnacles National Monument, CA 2007

Daniel Cheek has been traveling California back roads with his large-format cameras since his arrival from Michigan in 1998. Though often void of humans, his photographs always illuminate evidence of the human fingerprint on the land.  Taken with an 8 x 10 large format camera, the photographs exhibited are direct contact prints from his negatives rendering the sharpest, purest representation of his image. Cheek received his BFA from the Academy of Art College, San Francisco. His past exhibitions include showings at the Academy of Art College, Sutter Street Gallery, San Francisco; Northeastern Nevada Museum, Elko, 2006; and Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, 2006.

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