Las Hermanas Iglesias “Everybody Likes to Dance”, Migdalia Luz Barens-Vera "Ahora / Now: Stop III, El Barrio, New York” Traci Molloy “Missed / Dismissed” & Jorge Rojas “Naturaleza Muerta / Still Life”

Taller Boricua

poster for Las Hermanas Iglesias “Everybody Likes to Dance”,  Migdalia Luz Barens-Vera "Ahora / Now: Stop III, El Barrio, New York” Traci Molloy “Missed / Dismissed” & Jorge Rojas “Naturaleza Muerta / Still Life”

This event has ended.

As part of our 40th Anniversary celebration, the Taller Boricua presents the second in our series of multiple, solo exhibitions by artists who share our mission in the arts: aesthetics, performance, activism and community.

Las Hermanas Iglesias (Janelle and Lisa Iglesias) create multimedia and multidisciplinary works that address their shared autobiographical experiences. For “Everybody Likes to Dance,” Las Hermanas create an audio-visual installation involving custom-made disco balls that reference imagery of their Dominican and Norwegian cultures and spin over an interactive dance floor diagram. The step-by-step instructions encourage viewers to listen to the music while trying to trace and learn the dance movements. For these original tracks, Las Hermanas approached six international musicians to each create “mash-ups” of a Dominican Merengue and a Norwegian Pols: Chris Gooris, Christopher “Ryan” Spence, Colin Bragg, Mark Vicente and Guilt and Johannes Brechter with mastering by Gregory Adkins. To complement these mash-ups, Las Hermanas developed a unique choreography, inviting the viewer to experience a fusion of the two traditional, yet diverse, dances and cultures.

"Ahora / Now: Stop III, El Barrio, New York” is the third incarnation of Migdalia Luz Barens-Vera’s multimedia three-channel video, sound, art object installation and public intervention. This site-specific performance takes place through the lens of a video camera and is executed, recorded and edited by the artist. The piece is an evolving allegory of a woman who, both literally and figuratively, takes the walls of her “home” – the symbolic transporter, collector and guardian of memories – with her as she relocates. Poignantly moving her Plexiglas “house” through the streets, she gathers newfound belongings, reconfiguring and recreating it as she goes along. In "Ahora / Now,” diverse worlds are fused together and familar spacio-temporal realities are shifted, negating the concepts of “local” and “global” and creating a hybrid sense of identity and place. In this instance, her final stop is the Taller Boricua in El Barrio where her collected objects will be exhibited along with the first two chapters of “Ahora / Now: Stop I, Puerto Rico and Stop II, Cuenca.”

Traci Molloy’s exhibition “Missed / Dismissed” uses text, photography, painting, and digital imaging to examine loss in relation to adolescent violence, with an emphasis on youth who have murdered their peers. The paradox between the public’s desire for sensational stories involving brutality and death and the private emotions that come as a result of grief and bereavement play a pivotal role in her work. While the media often overlooks the victim’s lives and experiences, instead focusing on the scandalous aspect of the crime, her ongoing series “Kids that Kill Kids” explores the psychological, social and political portraiture of the individuals involved. In her prints from the “White Dandelions” series, she manifests the ramifications of death and the absence of loved ones. For Molloy, it is the universal feeling of loss—of identity, life, and innocence—that ties the work together.

In the exhibition “Naturaleza Muerta / Still Life,” Jorge Rojas incorporates abstract, wax sculptures along with video, sound and light to examine the themes of artistic process, the creation of art, and the foundations of aesthetics. Collectively, Rojas’ work addresses the classical relationship of the beautiful and the sublime to contemporary notions of technology, nature, isolation and transcendence. For this exhibition, his process emphasizes the inherent metaphors within beeswax that in itself is a living force of nature in constant flux. Born of pain and pleasure, it has the power to separate and unite as well as obscure and clarify. Combined with prefabricated metals and sounds, Rojas’ sculptures navigate the ever-present dichotomies in life such as the ephemeral and the concrete, permanence and impermanence and creation and annihilation.

Media

Schedule

from March 26, 2010 to May 15, 2010

Opening Reception on 2010-03-26 from 18:00 to 21:00

  • Facebook

    Reviews

    All content on this site is © their respective owner(s).
    New York Art Beat (2008) - About - Contact - Privacy - Terms of Use