The Colored Bone China

Exposición / Herter Art Gallery at the University of Massachusetts / 125 A Herter Hall Union of M / Amherst Center, Massachusetts, Estados Unidos
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Cuándo:
03 oct de 2018 - 30 oct de 2018

Inauguración:
03 oct de 2018

Organizada por:
Herter Art Gallery at the University of Massachusetts

Artistas participantes:
Juana Valdes

       

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Descripción de la Exposición

n the exhibition The Colored Bone China, Valdes collects, arranges, and transforms mass-produced ceramic objects to explore her personal experiences as an Afro-Cuban American–Latinx artist. By investigating the history and origin of these objects, Valdes maps the complex terrain of multiple cultures and nations that constitute her own identity, and how it is constantly shaped and reshaped by experiences of displacement and transculturation. The resulting discourse is both political and poetic. In these installations, the cultural product is displaced from its place and time of origin, both in terms of ethnicity and labor. Through a series of physical, material, and conceptual operations, domestic wares are stripped of their passive functions, transforming ornaments into vehicles of aesthetic value. Their design and decorative patterns serve as indexical references to the social class that both collect them as well as dictate their production and distribution. In the work The Colored China Rags, Valdes disturbs the glossy white ceramic of bone china by injecting pigment into clay, thereby altering its chemical composition and becoming an actor in the transmutation of the material’s DNA. Color thus becomes race in this series of delicately crafted ceramic rags, ranging from the subtler shades to brown, to more elusive black skin tones. Through their color and folds, issues of cultural memory, transculturation, and hybridization resurface, and along with them, historically skewed relationships become apparent.

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