IRREVERSIBLE A Creative Practice. “Change the Culture, Change the World”
IRIS Photo Collective Presents:
IRREVERSIBLE A Creative Practice. “Change the Culture, Change the World”
RSVP: norelkysb@irreversiblemagazine.com
WHERE: Little Haiti Cultural Center |212 – 260 NE 59 Terrace Miami, FL 33137
WHEN: Aug 16th, 2013 6pm
“Success comes in all shapes and colors. You can be successful in your job and career but you can equally be successful in your marriage, at sports or a hobby. Whatever successes you are after there is one thing all radically successful people have in common: Their ferocious drive and hunger for success makes them never give up. Successful people often paint a picture of the perfect ascent to success. In fact, some of the most successful people in the art business, entertainment and sport have failed. Many have failed numerous times but they have never given up. Successful people are able to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and carry on trying. This is simply the best description of what 8th IRREVERSIBLE years have been for me.”
Noor Blazekovic
“Mask” by award-winning Miami Herald photographer, Carl Juste
Havana and Haiti, Two Cultures, One Community
Nineteen years of visual reportage, sixteen writers, seven photojournalists, two countries, and one humanity. That was the focus of “Havana and Haiti: Two Cultures, One Community.” An exhibition (2010) that was accompanied by a featured book, which contained an introduction and 17 essays from recognized contributing editors and writers who include Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts of The Miami Herald,critically-acclaimed Haitian author Edwidge Dandicat, and national-award winning Herald columnist Ana Menendez along with several distinguished award-winning writers.
One country is frozen in time, crumbling under the self-inflicted scourge of a socialist philosophy. After 50 years of this nightmare, it finds itself a dictatorship without a dictator. Its people have seen their will wringed from their being. The other a country slave to a perpetually failing government and non-existent social and healthcare systems is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere. Its future vanishes everyday as it endures one of the world’s highest infant mortality rates. Havana and Haiti, Two Cultures, One Community by Iris PhotoCollective is an intimate look at the similarities in these two peoples lives and the oftentimes-stark differences. Their common bond extends beyond leaving their countries and arriving on the shores of their adopted home.
Lucinda Linderman
b. born in Chattanooga, resides in Miami USA
Lucinda Linderman, born in Chattanooga, has been a full time artist with works exhibited in juried shows since 2001. After graduating with a B.A. in biology, she decided to pursue her dream of becoming and artist. She worked as a master apprentice to world renowned constructivist sculptor John Henry from 2001 until 2006, where both her aesthetic sense and technical skills were honed. Lucinda recently graduated from the University of Miami with a MFA in sculpture. Among several prestigious residencies, Linderman was the Robert M. Macnamara artist-in-residence in Westport Island, Maine, in 2005. Lucinda was an artist-in-residence at the CANDO Arts Co-op from 2009 to 2011, where she was the director of Sol Gallery during 2011. She is currently creating and Eco-Art Outreach Program at the Deering Estate at Cutler, in Miami.
Alejandro Mendoza
b. 1967 Cuba, resides in USA
Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1967 Alejando Mendoza was recognized for his work at an early age when it was included in the permanent collection of Museo Nacional de Bellas Arte and Centro Wifredo Lam, organizers of today’s Havana Biennial. After completing his formal education, Mendoza moved to Mexico where he spent the next 15 years developing an important body of work, which led to it being included at prestigious institutions such as the acclaimed Museo del Chopo, U.N.A.M, and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil. Mendoza moved to the United States, residing primarily along the East Coast between Miami and Philadelphia. His work has been included in prestigious collections and shows, such as The Farber Collection and The Noyes Museum in New Jersey. Since 2005, Mendoza has made his home in Miami, where he has achieved honors and won the Knight Foundation Arts Partnership Grant in 2008 from The John & James L. Knight Foundation. He has become a very important supporter of and contributor to the Magic City’s Art in Public Spaces effort, bringing the monumental sculptures known as “The Giants in the City” to Miami.
Pablo Cano
b. 1961 Cuba, resides in USA
Since childhood, marionettes have fascinated Pablo. At the age of ten, he was mounting elaborate plays for his family featuring puppets constructed of household bric-a-brac. His primary work today continues to center around the marionettes that he fashions from found objects, and the performance pieces he composes to showcase these protagonists. Cano reveals, “I create a dream world where inanimate objects come to life – springing from my imagination in the Surrealist tradition. But my work is founded on Dada ideals. The Dadaists used chance, spontaneity, and childlike innocence in order to create their statement. Their intention, as is mine, was to break with tradition and painting technique and to return to the elemental basics of art; to start from scratch; to allow the process of imagination to unfold and begin anew each time I create.”
Bonnie Clearwater, former Director and Chief Curator, MOCA North Miami observes, “Each marionette is a complete sculpture in its own right that is exhibited in the museum in its inanimate state; but when their creator and grand puppeteer Cano performs them, the figures take on a life force that causes the audience members to suspend their disbelief.” She continues, “It was clear right from Cano’s first productions at MOCA that a truly original artist, who marched to his own drummer, was in our midst. In the 1990’s, at a time when conceptual art dominated the international art world, Cano followed his heart and passion, seeing treasures in garbage and bringing unforgettable characters into existence.”
Paco Pomet
b. 1970, Lives and works in Granada, Spain.
Granada-born artist Paco Pomet bases his paintings on old archival photographs, interjecting silly, surreal, and absurd elements — skewed and stretched features, scale shifts, extra or missing limbs, or goofy pop imagery — commenting on the distorting nature of memory.
Alexis W
b. 1968, resides in Madrid, Spain
Armando Marino
b. 1968 Cuba, resides in USA
Using each painting as an independent frame, in the style of a comic strip or graphic novel, Mariño places his character in a series of odd situations, in which the figure adopts irreverent, almost bizarre attitudes. He uses Marcel Duchamp’s urinal—a temple of the analytical tradition of modern art—to satisfy a physiological necessity, or fills it with basketballs swiped from a Jeff Koons work. He climbs into Marat’s bathtub to demand the rights of liberty, equality, and fraternity, or prepares to take flight like Icarus. (Whether he stays aloft or falls is left to the imagination of the viewer.)
“‘By cannibalizing images, styles, techniques, references, and inherited material’—explained the artist—‘I have tried to make visible the stereotypes and erroneous concepts that underlie certain narratives and discourses practiced by the Western world, and their relationship to the excluded ‘other’” (Mariño, 2006). With substantial doses of humor that mask a sincere reverence, Mariño does not propose a Taliban-style demolition of the paradigms of Western art, but a questioning of their assumed universality.
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