“Please keep me on your CV” Exhibition

Selenas Mountain

[Image: Marisol Ruiz "Salió el Sol" (2022) Oil, oil stick, and glitter on canvas 42 x 32 in.]

This event has ended.

Selenas Mountain presents Please keep me on your CV, an exhibition of works by three emerging female artists currently based in New York, Chantal Feitosa-Desouza, Camila Varon Jaramillo, and Marisol Ruiz. Please keep me on your CV is a playful title referencing the artists burgeoning careers and the heights of their ambitious potential. The show title is an ode to the freedom at the beginning of an artists’s career and a fresh exciting moment to decide one’s artistic trajectory. The works by Feitosa, Jaramillo, and Ruiz share a focus on the re-examination of domesticity, femininity, and architectural interiors. This exhibition is a curatorial experiment to reach back to making conceptual connections through a wide-eyed gaze.

Chantal Feitosa-Desouza will be exhibiting works that are a new direction in her studio practice. Known for her multi-disciplinary multimedia projects spanning performance, video, and storytelling, the artist has recently turned her cultural production towards archiving and collage. The artist is interested in collage as a medium for mind-mapping and recontextualization of meaning. Drawing inspiration from her bi-cultural upbringing between the US and Brazil, the artist uses non-linear narratives to explore cultural hybridity. The collage works incorporate female figures reminiscent of the Brazilian “namoradeira” (a decorative ceramic bust that typically depicts a Black or Brown woman resting on a windowsill lost in reverie.) Chantal Feitosa-Desouza says her work is interested in deconstructing and reclaiming this cultural archetype to explore “alienation, escapism, and Western ‘discovery’ at the expense of the colonized body across time and continental borders”.

Camila Varon Jaramillo’s new series of paintings titled “Topografias” is a double entendre referencing the artists’s background as an architect and the architectural process of developing topographic maps, as well as the artists cultural upbringing in Colombia. These paintings speak to the way that we analyze and learn from a place, in an effort to understand it. The tropical and floral imagery references the artist’s memories of growing up in Colombia, one of the most diverse countries in the world as a result of its topography. In Colombian culture, nature is as fierce as it is fantastic, cristaline rivers of multiple colors, jungles of impenetrable vegetation, vast beaches of black sand, and orange deserts with teal colored ponds of water, serve as a few of the starting points for these works.

Marisol Ruiz creates paintings that spring from her Puerto Rican heritage and subconscious. The imagery travels through different dimensions of the ethereal and the intangible experience of life. Her research on Transcendentalism expanded her journey of spiritual excavation through painting. These scenes are a collage of the artist’s personal memories blended with depictions from her own imagination. The poetic visuals are meditations on the complex and healing nature of memory.

Chantal Feitosa-Desouza (b. 1996, New York, USA)
Chantal Feitosa-Desouza is a Brazilian United Statesian working across images, text, and the classroom. Her practice explores alternative systems of learning and knowledge distribution. She uses time-based media, collage, and language to propose slower ways of thinking, remembering, and storytelling. Her dual upbringing between New York City and Rio de Janeiro as a child has influenced her work’s use of nonlinear storytelling, translations, and assemblage.

Chantal’s videos have been screened at the Harlem International Film Festival (NY), Vidlings & Tapeheads (MI), and the Anti-Racist Classroom’s Represent Film Festival (CA). Her art and writing have been published in Apogee Journal and The Photographer’s Green Book. She was an artist in residence at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Residency Unlimited, and Smack Mellon. She received her BFA in Film/Animation/Video from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and is an MFA candidate at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art. Her education work centers on accessible arts access to youth, and she has both co-designed and facilitated curriculums for the Queens Council on the Arts, Apple (NY), and the Artists’ Literacies Institute.

Camila Varon Jaramillo (b. 1995, Bogotá, Colombia)
Raised in Bogotá, Colombia, Camila moved to New York in 2013 to study Architecture at Parsons School of Design and is currently pursuing an MFA at School of Visual Arts. Working as an architect, designer, and, artist over the past 8 years her work covers a wide range of disciplines. In the most recent years her work has been characterized by paintings with bright colors and dreamlike scenarios painted from memory, along with site specific installations and small objects that engage back and forth between architecture and art.

Camila’s work is a statement on the importance of believing in creating a world of our own to consequently change the world around us. The work invites the viewer to peek into her world, filled with the nostalgia of innocent and playful childhood memories that permeate the image through surrealist panoramas. In a manner of Latin American “Magical Realism”, imagination becomes both a weapon and a defense mechanism to confront and transform her surroundings.

Marisol Ruiz (b. 1999, Perth Amboy, New Jersey)
Marisol Ruiz is a painter who takes inspiration from being raised in Puerto Rico. Ruiz works with oil and acrylic paintings on canvas and panel. Her paintings are collages of inherited and imagined memories, framed like a photograph, by symbols of post-colonial history. Through painting, Ruiz explores the diasporic experience of the in between and the intimate meditation of memory.

Based in Brooklyn, New York Ruiz earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Humanistic Studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2020. She has exhibited at Paradice Palase, Current Space, Grimaldis Gallery, and Beverly’s NYC. Ruiz was recently featured on New American Paintings, Issue 160.