Past Exhibitions

Name

Rito, Espejo y Ojo / Ritual, Mirror and Eye: Photography by Luis González-Palma, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, and Pablo Soria

Dates

March 28, 2004 to June 13, 2004

Description

MOCRA is pleased to present the work of three significant Latin American artists to St. Louis audiences. While their personal and artistic backgrounds vary, all three artists share a common interest in creating multimedia works that extend the traditional bounds of each medium. These particular works employ the human figure as the central visual motif: iconic portraits, shadowed bodies, and loving meditations on family members. There are also thematic similarities: geographic dislocation, the intermingling of cultures and religions, and a sometimes palpable awareness of the past asserting or insinuating itself in the present.

Luis Gonzalez Palma was born in 1957 in Guatemala City and still lives there today. A self-taught photographer, he studied architecture and cinematography at the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala. He has exhibited widely throughout North and South America, Europe and Asia. Gonzalez Palma's work is included in various significant collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centro de Arte Reína Sofía in Madrid, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Fogg Museum at Harvard University. His best-known work depicts the indigenous and mestizo populations of his home country, often in a staged fashion evoking mythological and cultural characters. In his most familiar images, he paints over the photographs to achieve a sepia quality but leaves the whites of the subjects' eyes unpainted, to startling effect.

Born and raised in Cuba, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons studied in Havana at the National School of Art and the Superior Institute of Art (ISA), later training at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. She has lived and worked in Boston since 1991 and has shown extensively in the United States, Canada and abroad. Her work is in important public and private collections, including the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Campos-Pons was one of the artists in the United States representation at the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale, and showed in the 2001 Venice Biennale. Campos-Pons works in a variety of media, including photography, painting, and performance video. Recurring themes in her work include maintaining ties with the people and land from which she comes, the special character and role of women's discourse in society, and the nature of family communication.

Pablo Soria was born in Argentina in 1964 and received his BFA from the School of Fine Arts, National University of Tucumán, in 1989. He went on to study in Buenos Aires from 1989 to 1991 on a fellowship from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes for Painting. His works are represented in major private and public collections, including the Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires; the Philip Morris Collection, New York; and the Museum of Fine Art, Houston. Soria has participated in solo and group exhibitions throughout Latin America, the United States, and Europe. Of his series of self-portraits, he writes, "I place myself as the actor of my memories … It's an autobiographical vision of time, shaded by the obsession with the memory of the country left behind, love, childhood, death and loss." Soria's nostalgia is a powerful lens for his imagery. He lives and works in Miami, Florida.

MOCRA thanks Schneider Gallery, Chicago, for kind assistance in organizing this exhibition.

above:
Installation view of Rito, Espejo y Ojo / Ritual, Mirror and Eye at MOCRA, 2004. Photo by Jeffrey Vaughn.

Related MOCRA Voices episodes

Watch Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons: The Kristen Peterson Lecture

Episode 23: Martha Schneider

Media

Read the Riverfront Times review of Rito, Espejo y Ojo / Ritual, Mirror and Eye.