CULTURAL BODIES
Solo Exhibition
by Maria Cristina Jadick
at Sicardi Sanders Gallery,
Houston, TX
@Abdel Hernandez
Artist, Ethnographer and Cultural Theorist, Research Associate,
Anthropology Department- Rice University
Cristina Jadick is a young Cuban American Artist born in the United States. Her visual work is characterized by a strong personal style, that places us on a new and provocative road at the intersection between the languages of Contemporary Art and cultural performances that explore identity and memory.
Today in a world of growing information complexity and generalized markets, the definitions of "the aesthetic" as well as "the beautiful" are outdated. The aesthetic, in a highly pragmatized universe, acts as a therapeutic vehicle to define everyday experiences and becomes an ideal place to explore cultural resonances and values that may not be expressed in the typifying language of common sense.
The exhibit presented here, "Cultural Bodies", is an example of the above. The Exhibit is presented as aesthetic pages or slides that work as expressive interfaces of the Artist's living process. The pieces that constitute the exhibit are the result of a year of research done by Cristina to explore her own identity, memory and cultural heritage developed during long processes of migratory dynamics and bilingualism that were present when she was growing up and that constituted her own ethos, values and emotional world that elapsed between her and the society she grew up in.
But in addition to this intimate exploration, Cristina's work also communicates individual introspection with collective abreaction. By means of an archeology of what is yours, of relics and personal belongings using her own body as an inventory of "blind marks," visiting herself as though in an excavation session, exploring her own shadows and sewing languages inherited from her predecessors traditions, Cristina discovers in her own oblivion of Cuban culture, forms of aesthetic memory hidden and masked by remembrance. In addition to the myth of the search for self, the artist wants to make us understand how even in oblivion and at the bottom of individual experience, we again find culture, solidarity and connection with others.
The exhibit that subtly evokes the power dilemma in Cuba is expressed as a journey going from the personal-intimate to the collective-cultural. In addition to the conflicts that keep the island divided, the repression of its future and its hopes, the culture is a universe of evocation of bridges full of metaphors of solidarity and integration in the ethos. In this sense, each canvas is done as a sensory cultural body, a sensitive surface covered with forbidden areas, silent spaces, sutures of difficult moments, places that show lack of determination, and, above all moments of hope. Evoking geometric languages, old graphics and numeric maps on the high plane, highly poeticized, the works, project amazing tension which borders between the rational and the emotional. Each piece is expressed as a biographic vehicle as well as a sensitive body in which we can find the traces of time, the marks of gestures thst occurred some time ago, transient inscriptions of faces that were seen some time ago, evocation of sounds, the presence and absences that appeared in memory some time ago.
"Cultural Bodies" is one of those exhibits that leaves you, not only with a number of interpretations but also with a feeling of hope. Cristina Jadick is a young woman with a recent art career whose work however, evidences one of those expressive talents that exceed the norm. I met Cristina in the Spring af 1997. Since then, I have been impressed by her early and commendable way of utilizing printmaking techniques and mixed media as creative games of palimpsest and bricollage. Today, as I stand in front of this exhibit, I observe in awe the marks of transparency, the metaphor of what is insinuated, the development of an expressive technique with little precedent in the imagery of contemporary visual postmodernism"
Being able to make the materials and their combinations blend in such a way that instead of expressing their inherent selves, make emotions, values, memories speak is the maximum aspiration aesthetic experience can have, that is going by tradition, as in cinema or theater, where the aesthetic is seen as being directly linked to anthropologic emotions, intuitions and to the collective ethos. This is not easy. Most of the works of art distract us with how they were created_and this is perhaps what conveys most clearly her unique talent_is that the materials act as ventriloquists, as if through them, the creator achieves a monologue of their essence, breaking form, journeying directly to the horizon of the senses, emotions and feelings.
Solo Exhibition
by Maria Cristina Jadick
at Sicardi Sanders Gallery,
Houston, TX
@Abdel Hernandez
Artist, Ethnographer and Cultural Theorist, Research Associate,
Anthropology Department- Rice University
Cristina Jadick is a young Cuban American Artist born in the United States. Her visual work is characterized by a strong personal style, that places us on a new and provocative road at the intersection between the languages of Contemporary Art and cultural performances that explore identity and memory.
Today in a world of growing information complexity and generalized markets, the definitions of "the aesthetic" as well as "the beautiful" are outdated. The aesthetic, in a highly pragmatized universe, acts as a therapeutic vehicle to define everyday experiences and becomes an ideal place to explore cultural resonances and values that may not be expressed in the typifying language of common sense.
The exhibit presented here, "Cultural Bodies", is an example of the above. The Exhibit is presented as aesthetic pages or slides that work as expressive interfaces of the Artist's living process. The pieces that constitute the exhibit are the result of a year of research done by Cristina to explore her own identity, memory and cultural heritage developed during long processes of migratory dynamics and bilingualism that were present when she was growing up and that constituted her own ethos, values and emotional world that elapsed between her and the society she grew up in.
But in addition to this intimate exploration, Cristina's work also communicates individual introspection with collective abreaction. By means of an archeology of what is yours, of relics and personal belongings using her own body as an inventory of "blind marks," visiting herself as though in an excavation session, exploring her own shadows and sewing languages inherited from her predecessors traditions, Cristina discovers in her own oblivion of Cuban culture, forms of aesthetic memory hidden and masked by remembrance. In addition to the myth of the search for self, the artist wants to make us understand how even in oblivion and at the bottom of individual experience, we again find culture, solidarity and connection with others.
The exhibit that subtly evokes the power dilemma in Cuba is expressed as a journey going from the personal-intimate to the collective-cultural. In addition to the conflicts that keep the island divided, the repression of its future and its hopes, the culture is a universe of evocation of bridges full of metaphors of solidarity and integration in the ethos. In this sense, each canvas is done as a sensory cultural body, a sensitive surface covered with forbidden areas, silent spaces, sutures of difficult moments, places that show lack of determination, and, above all moments of hope. Evoking geometric languages, old graphics and numeric maps on the high plane, highly poeticized, the works, project amazing tension which borders between the rational and the emotional. Each piece is expressed as a biographic vehicle as well as a sensitive body in which we can find the traces of time, the marks of gestures thst occurred some time ago, transient inscriptions of faces that were seen some time ago, evocation of sounds, the presence and absences that appeared in memory some time ago.
"Cultural Bodies" is one of those exhibits that leaves you, not only with a number of interpretations but also with a feeling of hope. Cristina Jadick is a young woman with a recent art career whose work however, evidences one of those expressive talents that exceed the norm. I met Cristina in the Spring af 1997. Since then, I have been impressed by her early and commendable way of utilizing printmaking techniques and mixed media as creative games of palimpsest and bricollage. Today, as I stand in front of this exhibit, I observe in awe the marks of transparency, the metaphor of what is insinuated, the development of an expressive technique with little precedent in the imagery of contemporary visual postmodernism"
Being able to make the materials and their combinations blend in such a way that instead of expressing their inherent selves, make emotions, values, memories speak is the maximum aspiration aesthetic experience can have, that is going by tradition, as in cinema or theater, where the aesthetic is seen as being directly linked to anthropologic emotions, intuitions and to the collective ethos. This is not easy. Most of the works of art distract us with how they were created_and this is perhaps what conveys most clearly her unique talent_is that the materials act as ventriloquists, as if through them, the creator achieves a monologue of their essence, breaking form, journeying directly to the horizon of the senses, emotions and feelings.