Not ~ At Home: Cecilia Paredes
1912 Gallery, Special Collections, Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr, PA
October 25, 2023 – June 2, 2024
PLEASE SEE CHECKLIST BELOW FOR IMAGE CAPTIONS. INSTALLATION PHOTOGRAPHS BY Zachary Hartzell, BLANK Creative.
Peruvian-born, Philadelphia-based artist Cecilia Paredes (b. 1950) makes photographs and sculptures that reflect her lived experience of diaspora. Sueños Fugitivos (Fugitive Dreams), a series of photographs begun in 2005, registers meticulously-crafted performances for the camera. For these “photo-performances,” her skin is painted to match the ornate, floral patterns of fabrics she sources from markets around the world. This chameleon effect confuses flesh with fabric and expresses her sense of identity as something that shifts according to her surroundings. Flattened as if part of a wallpapered domestic space, Paredes also contends with an experience of gender in which women’s bodies, fertility, and labor are flattened and restricted to satisfy patriarchal demands. She merges flower painting, one of few creative outlets historically available to women, with a radical kind of cosmetics to refuse taming, capture, or categorization.
Paredes’s sculptures include gilded canoes whose bows reroute their direction, a sinuous trumpet that inhibits its own music, and disembodied feet. In the turnaround, stilling, and tangling of these objects, the artist questions Western logics of progress and asks us to acknowledge the limits of intelligibility. Such rethinking is perhaps nowhere more necessary than in the institutional spaces of libraries and museums, inheritors of Enlightenment standards of acquisition and categorization as the pathways to knowledge—logics that likely compelled the collection of artifacts also included in this exhibition. Thinking with Paredes’s objects as conceptual frameworks, how might we turn back and around?
