This email is part of a series of regular updates about
Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, which opens on October 25, 2013. In this post, curatorial assistant Florencia Bazzano-Nelson explores how one immigrant artist, iliana emilia garcía, imagines her ongoing ties to her native county of birth.
Below is an excerpt, visit the museum's blog Eye Level for the full post.
-- Georgina
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Imagining Migration,
iliana emilia garcía's Chairs
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Unknown Distances, from the series Unknown Distances/Undiscovered Islands
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Dominican-born artist iliana emilia garcía, who trained as an artist both in her native Dominican Republic and in New York City, has featured the chair in her work since the 1990s. Whether represented in painting, drawing, photography or three-dimensional installations, this motif allows garcía to explore not only psychological and spiritual states but also social and cultural interactions. The human scale of the chair and its inherent connection to the sitter has encouraged artists like garcía to anthropomorphize this ubiquitous object.
Each photograph in the series captures a chapter in an open-ended narrative about migration. garcía's eloquent chairs behave like two characters in a photo-novel. They come together by the seashore, pull apart, and stand their ground on the wet sand. They look at the ocean, an archetypal image for an artist raised on an island, or turn inland as if to consider home or family. These two chairs enact the heartbreaking tension created by the desire for unknown worlds and the lure of the familiar. One chair braves the sea and one stays behind, their fluid chain of interactions frozen into moments of heightened emotional tension. She printed her photographs on canvas, which lends them a soft, romantic quality.
Visit the blog for the full post. Our America opens on October 25, 2013.
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Smithsonian American Art Museum
P.O. Box 37012
Washington, D.C. 20013
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