Visual Memory: Home + Place
Scherezade García and iliana emilia García
September 26, 2019 – March 8, 2020
OPENING RECEPTION
Thursday, September 26, 2019
6-8PM
RSVP
HOURS
Tuesday-Sunday 10AM-5PM
LOCATION
OAS AMA | Art Museum of the Americas
201 18th Street NW
Washington, DC 20006
ADMISSION
Free
The OAS AMA | Art Museum of the Americas and the Permanent Mission of the Dominican Republic to the OAS present Visual Memory: Home + Place, an exhibition by multimedia artists Scherezade García and iliana emilia García. Curated by Olga Ulloa Herrera and Adriana Ospina, this mid-career survey explores how each artist reflects upon constructed notions of human geography and history in a creative multidisciplinary approach. Generating a provocative and incisive rethinking about the possibilities of visual memory, they engage with timeless universal concerns and amplified questions on global migration, settlement, and the spaces we occupy.
Developed in close collaboration with the artists, Visual Memory: Home + Place features important works in a wide range of media—paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, and installations—some not previously shown. The exhibition is accompanied by amply illustrated companion volumes with interviews and essays.
iliana emilia García has been using the chair as her personal tool/star/instrument related to tradition and visual history; and one of the most public of signs, the heart, as the symbol to represent the intimate side of a communal activity as it is to feel, to remember and to interpret. She intends for these icons to tell history and to remember it; precisely humans’ basic need of emotional comfort, and our sense of loss and gain. To her, it is a constant search, not for answers, but for a certain satisfaction, and of an alleged reason of tradition when we believe to have one through the repetitions of patterns, which lead to an apparent safety.
Scherezade García’s work inhabits a baroque universe of different worlds of aesthetic planes. Through her work, she becomes a storyteller. Her visual narratives generate energy, alluding to the emotional physicality of artmaking; and there is the urgency of a concept to keep alive. The physical and emotional experience of drawing is essential to her process. Through her drawings, she creates beauty with lines. The process of drawing gives rise to visual codes which lead her to spontaneous compositions and intriguing meanings at once. She works in drawing, painting, installations, artists’ books, and video animation. Through these different media, she creates contemporary allegories of history, colonization, and politics.
The exhibition has received major support from the Secretariat of Hemispheric Affairs of the Organization of American States, the Permanent Mission of the Dominican Republic to the OAS, and the FAMA | Friends of the Art Museum of the Americas.
Additional support for the catalogs has been provided by: Reginald García Muñoz and Iliana Ubias Renville, Tony Hernández, Carlos and Olga Herrera, Family García Matos, José Miguel Gómez, Pedro Cerón, Andrés Sánchez, Juan Victor Arámboles, Gilberto Cardenas and Dolores García, and Susan Delvalle.
Additional funding for the exhibition has been provided by: Ercilia Hernández, Jennifer Fleming, Ana-Ofelia Rodríguez, Berenice Barinas, José Vidal, Erick Ríos, Joanne Flores, V. Cybill Charlier, Manon Slome, Zeneida Moreno, Daisy Auger-Domínguez, Lilly Dollenmayer, Cecile Chong, Jennifer Lawrence, Alison Meares Cohen, Julia Santos Solomon, Ilonka Ubiñas, Jennifer Favorite, Reyin Leys, and Carolynn Sheehan.
Accessibility: AMA’s first floor is wheelchair accessible by appointment, with a ramp that can be installed at the back entrance to the museum. There is a gravel pathway leading to the back entrance. There is one half-step leading from the first room into the first-floor galleries. There is a flight of winding stairs leading to the museum’s second floor. Restrooms are located on the second floor. For more information on accessibility, or to make an appointment to visit, please contact 202 370 0147 or [email protected]