The solo exhibition of Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning’s 2008-9 Workspace Artist Juana Valdes opens on Wednesday, May 27th. This exhibition, Past/Present Tense—TIEMPOS DEL SUBJUNTIVO, culminates Ms. Valdes’ year-long artist residency at JCAL.
Originally from Cuba, Juana Valdes’ work is informed by her personal experiences as an immigrant, her Afro-Cuban traditions and the social contexts of race, migration, and trans-cultural experiences. Ms. Valdes adopts an anthropological and archeological approach, mining historical and literary texts in order to re-interpret and re-frame collective history, memory, and imagination, providing a means with which to navigate the social conditions of the present. Her work elicits migration as a complex process, constructing history through a continuum that involves both the original sources of the diasporic community and the new homeland.
During her residency, Ms. Valdes, an installation artist and sculptor, continued her on-going work, “Tranquil Waterways,” an installation investigating migration and transculturation directly and poetically. Manifested in a largescale sail made of white handkerchiefs sewn together, “Tranquil Waterways” addresses post-colonization from the semiotics of commercial and mass produced imagery. She also completed "The Journey Within" which involves an impressive number of hand-size porcelain boats installed in a Japanese wave pattern on the floor. Additionally, she developed several new bodies of work including “H2O/SE” in which she produced porcelain casts of plastic water bottles in different stages of deterioration and dehydration to draw attention to the socio-political contexts of the water shortage that exists today worldwide. Her work circumscribes issues of displacement and personal transmutation via the everyday object as a personal and time-based reference diachronic in orientation.
