Etchings, Lithographs, Ball point pen by Juan Solis Cruz

“My work is about identity, culture, family, and trying to find a creative way to explore the pros and cons of different forms of assimilation. It’s the story of learning through hard work that I’d rather bend the world to myself then myself bend to it. My work is a palimpsest of these experiences. The confusion in my work mirrors the confusion in my life, learning to embrace the chaos rather than trying to find the answers. The pursuit of understanding my past has lead me to seek the importance of image and text through abstraction. Beyond the direct, contextual meaning given by text, the forms and gestures of letters and symbols have their own way of communicating with the viewer. A question that comes up in my work is what happens when the text becomes separated from its intended meaning. As meaning is stripped away from text, the ambiguity causes it to become symbolic and makes its signifiers arbitrary and undetermined. These works come together to express landscape and place in both detail and abstraction, taking my work from the past to the present.”

Exhibition Dates: April 14 through May 5, 2018.