AMALIA GALDONA BROCHE | LAVAUGHAN JENKINS | APRIL WRIGHT

Amalia Galdona Broche

Lavaughan Jenkins

April Wright

Zoom Event: September 26th at 1pm PST
Demetri Broxton in conversation with the Artists!
Make your Zoom reservation: contact@patriciasweetowgallery.com

Exhibition Dates: 8 August – 26 September 2020

PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is pleased to present Amalia Galdona Broche, fiber sculpture; Lavaughan Jenkins, sculptural painting; and April Wright, fiber sculpture. The work in this exhibition poses as intermediary – to a location, a state of mind, a state of being. Exhibition dates are August 8^th through September 26^th. Reception is by appointment only.

Amalia Galdona Broche’s woven textile sculpture/installations speak to the complexity of growing up in a culture, country and political system vastly different from her family’s adopted country, America. Leaving Cuba when she was an adolescent, meant separating from what she knew, understood, and was part of. The culture, divisions, history and politics of America posed a distinctly different way of existing, interacting and thinking. Her work emphasizes this complexity.

“I was a child of the Cuban Revolution during the Special Period, a time of extreme economic adversity. I have conflicted feelings about my idealized childhood in Cuba as opposed to the country’s current reality and uncertain future. Through sculpture and time-based media, I explore the fluid nature of identity, faith, memory of identity, transculturation and immigration, highlighting labor-intensive processes such as collecting, tearing, breaking, joining, weaving, knotting and assembling textiles and found materials. Referencing Spanish, as well as West African belief systems, rituals and imagery, I navigate the complex and fluid nature of history and identity. By investigating the history and roots of a divided nation through a visual language, my work seeks to understand the impact of identity politics, migration and time, as well as collective and personal memory in order to mitigate my own perceived powerless part as a cultural ‘other.’”

In this exhibition Amalia weaves, sews, and braids “Companions of Concealment,” a hybrid of female and animal forms – a supernatural cosmology of ancestral beings who are intermediaries between humans and the spirit world, in death, birth, healing and conflicts.

Amalia is a 2021 MFA candidate at the School of Art & Visual Studies, University of Kentucky. Residencies include MASS MoCA Studios/Assets in 2019 as well as the New York Academy of Art in 2015.

Tired of viewing art history through a lens devoted to Western European Art, Lavaughan Jenkins decided to contribute his vision, a vision where Black people were not subordinate to a European construct, but instead were featured, by a Black Artist.

Lavaughan Jenkins’s sculptural paintings tell a story, a story that reflects the ordinary, the non-heroic, the quiet countenance of a single Black individual. Modest in scale, sensuous in materials, the lone figure acts as a “Watcher,” a witness to their experience. Jenkins sees successive layers of oil paint as assembled history in the Watcher’s story. Sculpted from molding paste and foam, building a thick colorful impasto, Jenkins is able to individualize each sculpture’s gesture, attitude and expression. The emotive power in his community of figures is the embodiment of grace and beauty.

Jenkins lives and works in Boston, MA. He received his BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Recently he was awarded the 2019 James and Audrey Foster Prize, with an exhibition at the ICA/Boston in 2019.

With visceral impoverishment, and a zealot’s pursuit of reformation, April Wright stresses her materials into stories of dislocation and dispossession. “I use humble everyday materials to simulate fragile moments that live in between abandonment and renewal, connecting emotional and physical landscapes of home. Inspiration is drawn from emotional support systems that inhabit domestic spaces and empathy of loss from fragile narratives. In my process there remains ever present, a cyclical act of accumulating, repurposing, and building. My installations and sculptures are precarious and redolent with gestures of longing for stability within the home.”

Included in the exhibition are four tapestries, with a checklist of materials that presents as a metaphoric preamble to a Gothic novel. “Uprooted” comprises dry rotted cotton strips, white cording, yarn, discarded threads and cotton strips, fake sinew, wooden reeds, dried moss, suture cotton thread, worn bedsheets, dipped in unfired red earthenware, patched with shellac and hung on a strip of wood.

April Wright is an emerging artist who received her MFA in 2020 from the School of Art & Visual Studies, University of Kentucky.