Totem Collage

I am a multimedia Cuban artist working across media, materials, and scales, from small collage to large art installations with painting, sculptures, and photography in between. I grew up in the second oldest part of the city of Havana, three blocks from Havana Bay and the broad seawall stretching for 5 miles along the coast from old Havana to the new Havana (Vedado), Cuba. Outside of Havana, I have lived in many cities and for a while in the countryside. Crafting narratives that exist in the uncanny space between facts and fiction and using old and new materials I make artworks with unpredictable stories that are half revealed. I explore the dynamics of power relations, social constructs, fragmentation, transgressions, and myths. Central to this is the weight of memory shaping the nonlinear continuity of history and geography, people and places. My process is to allow stories to surface, to propose ways in which we mutate perspectives and see with new eyes allowing for the magic of alternative readings to emerge. From unexpected sources, new visions are created and official narratives are re-examined, enhanced, or dismantled. I am attracted to hybridity, the forgotten history, the anonymous image, the found object. Also religious symbol, intuitive gesture, words. During a process of recombining, the unexpected becomes visible in a multiplicity of works which involve research and planning but also allows for preconceived ideas to give way to flux, chance, and non-permanence. The element of time that has passed is evident in the imperfect quality of used or manipulated materials. In others, new materials are used and objects specifically created. My work can be precise, clean, visceral, rustic, minimal or baroque, where imperfection is embraced and flourishes, the mark of life on everything touched that has history and meaning emerges to be a witness. As each work evolves the medium, forms, and materials find their place in a process that always attracts new ideas to be investigated and new bodies of work to be created. DADA, Arte Povera, Cuban Modernism, Russian Avant Guard, African Art, California assemblage, Native American pottery are some of the things that have guided my work. I am inspired by the colors of the tropics, architecture, books, world religions, textiles, nature, travels I have not yet made, the mysteries of life and the sea...always the Sea.