Recent Works by Sandra Ramos
American University Museum, Katzen Arts Center, Washington, D.C.
Septiembre 6-Octubre 19, 2014
(…)Bridging the Past, Present, and Future: Recent Works by Sandra does not propose a solo-subject perspective; it is more a survey of the series Ramos has developed in recent years. Except for some of the engravings, most of the pieces were made after 2010, many of them in the United States where Ramos has been traveling regularly since being awarded The Fountainhead Art Residency in 2011. Despite the range of dimensions, media and specific themes addressed in each series, the main topics of the artist’s work are clearly consistent: the experience of migration and its physical, economic, social and emotional implications; and the reflection on the island/ nation, its contradictions, paradoxes and uncertain destiny. Both ideas seem to be connected by the experience of travel as a notion, travel as an experience that can be at the same time a real action and a cultural metaphor. Similar to other artists from the nineties such as Tonel, Kcho and Ibrahim Miranda, migration, travel, insularity and diaspora became a central obsession in the work of Sandra Ramos (…) Challenging the idea of identity as a static notion, the young girl—Sandra’s alter ego / archetype of more than one generation born and raised under the utopia of the Cuban Revolution—is constantly on the move. Her identity is always unfinished; it is a becoming, a process of transformation and choices, a correlation between the individual and the community, and sometimes a trick of chance and fate. (…)
