Throckmorton Fine Arts presents the exhibition “From Air to Earth, a Trail of Life Experience” a show that reunites the work of nine contemporary photographers from Mexico, Spain and The United States. Their photographic work in Latin American countries spans from the mid 1940’s to the first decade of the 2000s’s.
Their exploration of the territory though the camera revolves around different cultural, experiential and artistic issues. It ranges from aerial views of archeological landscapes of the Mayan Mexican ruins by Marilyn Bridges (USA, 1948), to the abstraction and visual experimentation present in the work by María García (Mexico, 1936 ), a photographer with a career of over sixty years who hasn’t yet received the recognition she has long deserved. Like many women artist, she was overshadowed by the spotlights cast on her male peers by critics and art professionals.
In this Trail of Life Experience, Throckmorton Fine Arts is eager to present the work of Carmén Ballvé (Madrid 1960). For over twenty years, Ballvé photographed the sugar field workers of the Mosquito Batey in Dominican Republic. Her work, dedicated to the people of this community, started when she first visited the Batey in 2002 and saw, in her own words “a place -she – thought was part of the past” due to the harsh working and living conditions.
Over the twenty years in which she visited and lived in the community, Ballvé created tight bonds that went beyond her photographic work with the people and families. She witnessed children becoming adults fast. Other generations came by with little change in the Bateyes. The result of this beautifully printed series is an impressive body of work in which the images and portraits brim with poetry, dignity and empathy towards the place and people she honors in her photographs.
Isabel Muñoz (Barcelona, 1955) is an exquisite photographer who sees the act of dance as a privileged subject to photograph. For this special women photographers exhibition, we decided to present images from two of her series dedicated to the art of dance in Latin American cultures. In her series Mythologies (2012), dedicated to the revered figures and the myth of Bolivian primitive cultures, the dancers wear sacred masks as a tribute to Mother Earth, Pachamama. These original masks were borrowed for the performance from the collection of the Museum of Anthropology in La Paz.
Yolanda Andrade (Mexico 1951) has photographed the city of Mexico and its people for more than fifty years. From the end of the 1970’s to the early 2000’s, she captured the urban landscape using only black and white with film. Her images are an ode to the popular culture and its references, where the kitsch thrives alongside the theatricality of its characters.
Tatiana Parcero (Mexico, 1967) is a visual artist who, since the early nineties, has been exploring with her body as a territory and self portraits while combining analogical and digital photography with cartographic drawings. She also incorporates anatomical drawings, codices, colonial and astrological maps in search of a reconstruction of identity, memory or passage of time.
Marta María Pérez Bravo (Cuba, 1959) is another visual artist who utilizes self- portraiture as a medium in her photographs. Over the course of three decades, she has explored the notions and connections between the Catholic religion and the beliefs of the African.Caribbean Santería, an African diasporic religion that blends Yoruba and Catholic beliefs, recognizing divinity in all things.
The artists and the works selected by Throckmorton Fine Arts for this second exhibition dedicated to the female gaze in the Latin American panorama are by no means an exhaustive list, nor do they pretend to cover all the artist who have used photography to portray the continent.
Nevertheless, the exhibition is an invitation to continue exploring and supporting the work of women photographers.
The photographs presented in this Trail of Life Experience, appeal to the best aspects of humanity, showcasing dignity, individual beauty, as well as singular and collective experiences in the same universe.
María Millan and Tania Sanabria, guest curators.
Throckmorton Fine Arts
145 East 57th Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10022
Tel. 212. 223. 1059
www.throckmorton-nyc.com
