Vengo de una isla de confusión (I Come from an Island of Confusion)
presents the first solo exhibition of artist Elsa María Meléndez (Caguas,
PR 1974) outside of her native Puerto Rico. Meléndez has a 25-year career
in the arts, standing out as a printmaker, installer and for her work
with textiles. This exhibition brings together a selection of pieces that
include three-dimensional theater constructions made with different
printing techniques, pieces in soft textiles and, her most recent work,
large-format embroidery.
" Meléndez sidesteps the personal in order to foregound the social. The deeply personal is displaced by the need to point out, and denounce, collective pain and suffering.
The artist often inserts a self-portrait, one of the most moving graces of her work, the determination to cast her private self aside and situate herself in the public space - vulnerable, but with integrity in the face of the monsters among which she lives.
The artist projects her art toward the world of controversy, polemics,
calling aesthetics into question in order to bolster politics: art as the public square."
(Nelson Rivera)
The different media gathered in this exhibition shows the urgency of
experimentation in her proposal. The large formats evidence the impulse to
document uncertainty, while defending the right to doubt.
Meléndez exposes cultural contradictions, denounces misogyny
and at the same time tempers her production to the nostalgia that is
lived in an island of confusion.
Visit virtual tour here:
