Ruth Buentello, Celeste De Luna, Rafael Fajardo, Joe Harjo, Kathy Vargas
Curated by Liz Paris and Chris Davila
August 29 - October 5, 2018
Opening Reception: Wednesday, August 29, 2018, 5:00 - 7:00pm
In the past 300 years and beyond, San Antonio has cultivated a rich history as a hub for migration, attracting an array of diverse cultures, people, and wildlife. An important and necessary resource, the springs at the headwaters of the San Antonio River supported life for Native Americans, indigenous Mexicans and later the Spanish colonizers, Canary Islanders, and European and U.S. settlers. Each group brought their own heritage, rituals, and traditions to the region, paving the way for San Antonio as a city built on a foundation of intersecting deep roots. This exhibition explores a small but impactful sample of visual discourse on this phrase through two interconnecting interpretations:
The first interpretation speaks to the diverse groups and cultures establishing the sociopolitical landscape of the South Texas region and the idea of genuine history versus imposed history, so frequently a topic of discussion and debate for our country and for artists. Today, as some of those same groups fight weaponized cruelty in the form of government policy (family separation), immigration faces its staunchest foe, nationalism. And the question remains: can we be who we are: American, while still holding on to where we came from?
The second interpretation relates to the nature of the processes displayed in the exhibited work—each artist employs a combination of materials, techniques—the interweaving of old and new processes and the combination of traditional and new media intertwining together (as roots often do).
Common themes of this exhibition include dehumanization, fear, and loss, but also hope, transition, and migration/movement. Much like the river that feeds us still, our deep roots continue to sustain and support us. Deep Roots aims to visually evoke the complex network of cultural diversity that San Antonio and the South Texas region were built from and continue to thrive upon.
Ruth Leonela Buentello received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011. She is a recipient of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors grant. Her works can be described as deeply visceral narratives about brown bodies and their relationships to their social and economic place in a south Texas Landscape.
This series of paintings is based on incidents the made headlines in the press that capture undocumented Latinx transmigration into the United States and expose the reality of their dehumanization, vulnerability, fear, loss, and criminalization. The paintings take an ethnographic standpoint and focus on body positioning and invisibility of the undocumented individual.
Celeste De Luna uses her art as a tool to understand and deconstruct oppressive paradigms in her physical, spiritual, and psychic environment, exploring the complexity of relationships of borderland people and their landscape. Common themes include the migrant/border experiences of women, children, families, the Tejas landscape, and the struggle of conflicting identities; at times, De Luna implements herself and her family as characters in constructed narratives. Predominantly a painter and printmaker, De Luna employs a feminist perspective that contradicts superficial “border violence” stereotypes.
An associate professor of Electronic Media, Art and Design at the University of Denver, Rafael Fajardo spent six years living, teaching, and working on the US/Mexico border. Part of an emerging group of artists who are exploring the potential of digital video games to express complex subject matter, Fajardo aims to locate a visual expression that is “of the region” and not imposed from the outside in Migration, a virtual space activated by audience participation.
Joe Harjo’s work uncovers the lack of visibility of Native American culture, identity, and lived experience, largely due to the continued absence of proper representation in mainstream culture. Incorporating prints, objects, installations, and words, Harjo’s series, Dead Indians, explores the line between truth and fabrication in the complex and undeniable relationship between Native history and United States history. The work questions and reframes the notion of contemporary identity which is so intricately woven into past generations—the results of being stripped of land, culture, spiritual practice, and tradition. Dead Indians directly speaks to culture being suffocated by stereotypes and the false identities that subsequently emerge from these events.
For Deep Roots, photographer Kathy Vargas has presented selections from two recent series. Masks addresses the creation and suppression of cultural identity, discussing the (masked) faces of contemporary times. Some masks are hidden out of fear, like the Disappearing Bronze Man, targeted for violence, deportation, or other acts of discrimination. Some masks, like the Fiend, remain hidden within the unmaskedfaces seen every day, perpetrating willful deceit.
I Can’t Keep Track of Each Fallen Robin is a line from a Leonard Cohen song, which he wrote about the loss of a friend. Using deceptively familiar subjects as compositions, the series is a contemplation on contemporary sociopolitical issues and the personal losses suffered as consequences of institutional ideologies.
About the Curators:
Liz Paris is the Assistant Registrar for Collections at the McNay Art Museum and the Arts Programmer for Freight Gallery and Studios in San Antonio. She received her MA in Art History from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2015 and a BA in English from the University of the Incarnate Word in 2011. Paris is a San Antonio native and has previously curated exhibitions for Revenant Gallery, the Lullwood Group, the McNay, and UTSA.
Chris Davila is an art consultant working in artist representation and museum and gallery programming of contemporary latino arts. An advocate for the arts in San Antonio, Ms. Davila has collaborated with many arts organizations including the McNay Art Museum, the Briscoe Western Art Museum, the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, Luminaria San Antonio and Say Sí. Ms. Davila is a contract graphic designer and struggling optimist.
Above Image: Kathy Vargas, The Disappearing Bronze Man, 2018. Gelatin silver print with hand-coloring
http://www.paisano-online.com/arts-and-life-articles/deep-roots-an-intersection-of-borders/
Deep Roots made Glasstire's Top Five!
Exhibitions are free and open to the public.
UTSA Main Art Gallery, Arts Building, 2.03.04 UTSA Main Campus, One UTSA Circle, San Antonio, TX 78249.
Tuesday - Friday 10am - 4pm
Saturday 1pm - 4pm,
Sunday & Monday closed.
Contact: art.events@utsa.edu | 210-458-4391
