“This side, or the other…” Exhibition

Cuchifritos

poster for “This side, or the other…” Exhibition

This event has ended.

Residency Unlimited and Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space presents This side, or the other… a culminating group exhibition of new work by the 2020 NYC-based artist residents Elizabeth Moran, Carlos Rosales-Silva, Christopher Udemezue, and Ziyang Wu. This side, or the other… features works conceived and manifested through the lens of our current moment of increasingly polarized debates around historical accuracy and alternative facts, migration and borders, death and rebirth, immunity and spirituality, falling on one side (or the other) in response to our long-standing democratic and constitutional crisis.

Elizabeth Moran’s research-based practice is informed by a preoccupation with the subjectivity of facts that take form in photography, audio, text, and found objects. For This side, or the other…, Moran presents Rose (East), a video from her ongoing research project Against the Best Possible Sources, which examines the earliest history of the first professional fact-checkers, a role invented in 1922 by Time magazine, and held exclusively by women until 1971. The video features imagery from the ceiling mural of the Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library, where fact-checkers did their research, and considers what is real (truth), what may appear to be true, and what is a simulacrum—a replacement of reality. Presenting a perpetual sunrise or sunset, the video illustrates a moment suspended in time that never reaches resolution. Rose (East) echoes many of our experiences during quarantine, in particular the act of looking outside from inside as the days seemed to blend together. Viewing the video from inside the gallery, the subtle image is almost overpowered by the daylight coming in. Only when the sun sets does the video become readily visible, but only to those on the street looking in.

Carlos Rosales-Silva’s practice considers a deep history of making that spans the complex visual communications of pre-colonial indigenous culture. In the installation Amanacer/Atardecer, the artist presents an obelisk of his own design that combines painting and publishing practices into a compact, multifaceted, and architectural object and container. The installation references the burial and unearthing of the Sun Stone of the Mexica people of the Valley of Mexico, once ruled by the Aztec Empire. Deeply influenced by his elders, Amanacer/Atardecer also serves as an abstracted visualization of the unearthing of the artist’s personal history.

A penchant for interviews and storytelling has deeply informed Christopher Udemezue’s visual art practice with a focus on his Jamaican heritage and the complexities of desire for connection, personal mythologies, generational trauma, healing, and his mother’s experience immigrating to the United States from Jamaica. Over the course of his residency, Udemezue read Joy DeGruy’s book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, and her recommendations on healing cross-generationally have had a particular impact. The works created for the exhibition center on ideas of uprooting anti-Blackness, the work of self reflection, the necessity of harnessing joy within Black children, and extending grace and empathy within the Black community.

Ziyang Wu is a Chinese artist based in New York who draws from contemporary technology, digital power structures, popular culture and the dynamics between identity and community and the alienation of both body and spirit. Where Did Macy Go? is an 11-episode animated video told through a series of reports by its main character Macy and their encounter with “the epidemic,” life under quarantine, the search for their grandfather’s farm, and their revival. The video explores the collapse of old community structures, the emergence of a new community after decollectivization, Confucian obedience vs. social obedience, the new tele-republic of home, “mask politics,” and social justice under the pandemic. Originally posted on TikTok, the video installation is a physical manifestation of an online project created in response to our contemporary moment of fear, complexity and confusion.

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Schedule

from October 09, 2020 to October 31, 2020
Hours: Wednesday – Sunday, 12pm – 6pm.

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