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.
