Barking at God – Retablos Mundanos, new photographs from American artist Josephine Sacabo, shows her embracing the present moment in a way radically different than in her past work. Combining retablos – Mexican devotional paintings of Catholic iconography – with graffiti from the streets of New Orleans (USA), Sacabo achieves an alchemy that reshapes each subject into something entirely new. Martyrs, saints, even Christ himself, are tagged over and through with spray paint, stickers, and posters.
Under Sacabo’s skilled hand the resulting images are artful rather than recklessly random, with the graffiti tags framing and enhancing the figures beneath – and thus creating works that range from the melancholy and haunting to the euphoric. Merging these two unique iconographies from her respective homes shows order descending into chaos, a theme that resonates all the more deeply with our increasingly disjointed and fragmented world.
“I began working on the images one day out of anguish and ended up rescued by a depth of meaning I never really meant to touch,” says Josephine Sacabo. “The resulting images are 22 x 28 inch hand-colored photogravures combining the graffiti of New Orleans with religious imagery from San Miguel in Mexico – the dueling iconographies of the two places I call home. I have no final judgement to make on the subjects. Each expression is presented with its consolations and its cruelties. They are what they are and hopefully the viewer finds something in them that speaks to what they themselves may have experienced, needed, or felt.”
Josephine Sacabo: Barking at God – Retablos Mundanos
October 14 to December 31, 2017
A Gallery for Fine Photography
241 Chartres St.
New Orleans, LA 70130
USA
