Homage and Remembrance: Curator's Statement
| Homage and Remembrance: The Past is Present, features installations,
shrines, and altars by artists Helène Aylon, Claudia Bernardi, Victor
Cartagena, and Rob Keller. The works provide contemporary
translations of holidays—Samhain, All Saint’s Day, All Hallows’ Eve,
All Souls Day, Yiskor and Yom Hashoa (Holocaust Remembrance Day), and
Día de los Muertos—that commemorate changing seasons and life passages
and honor past generations and loved ones. In this exhibition, the artists conceptually resurrect rituals related to death and rebirth, expanding them to address the legacies of a range of chosen subjects such as ancestors, martyrs, inherited traditions, victims of violence, and ongoing social struggles. At the center is a focus on the interconnectedness of people and histories. The exhibition thus aims to form linkages between the artists’ aesthetic practices and the diverse pasts and intellectual discourses that inform them, and to demonstrate how artists use formal vocabularies and techniques to reveal multicultural exposures and exchanges. In Homage and Remembrance: The Past is Present, history(s) and art are conceived as areas of inquiry that are in a constant process of change and negotiation, capable of addressing issues and posing questions related to the residues of the past in the present, and are here presented in the interest of intercultural dialogue. In this way, the artists honor those lives and histories that have contributed to informing and sustaining our own. In this spirit, I would like to dedicate this exhibition to Verna Brady, my mentor and beloved friend, and former Executive Director of the Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery at UC Santa Cruz, who passed away in July 2008. Anthony Torres, Curator |