NEW YORK, NY.- Ruiz-Healy Art announced the opening of its inaugural exhibition space in New York City, a gallery dedicated to presenting multidisciplinary art and public programming by Latinx, Latin American, and Texas-based artists. The gallery's inaugural exhibition, Cecilia Paredes & Chuck Ramirez: Photographing Identity, opened May 3 and runs through June 15, 2019.
Patricia Ruiz-Healy, Ph.D. states “we see the gallery's New York City location as an expansion to our current program that will grant us the ability to further engage institutions, art professionals and collectors. We are thrilled to have the ability to continue the gallery's mission of supporting emerging and established artists that predominantly address social issues and identity.”
The opening exhibition features the work of Cecilia Paredes and Chuck Ramirez (1962-2010). Working within issues of identity, both artists use photography to confront fundamental questions regarding the human condition.
As a San Antonio-based artist and graphic designer, Chuck Ramirez processed and deconstructed the media world in which he lived in. Using typography and digital imaging technology, Ramirez isolated and worked to recontextualize familiar objects to explore the transitory nature of human existence. As an HIV+ gay male artist, he addressed contemporary culture as well as margins of American culture, including the Mexican-American and queer experience.
The exhibit includes Coconut, a work done in 1997 that is charged with metaphors of ethnicity, and the relationship between art and cultural identity. For the first time, since his solo show at Artpace San Antonio in 1999, part of his Long Term Survivor Series is being featured. Cocktail (pill box) explores the rituals of sustaining life and desire in the context of the AIDS crisis. Working with materials and images that are part of his daily life, Ramirez transforms the language and power of advertising into a call for action and compassion, expression and self-actualization.
Originally from Lima, Peru, and based in Philadelphia since the early 2000s, Cecilia Paredes combines themes found in nature - origins, camouflage, transformation, and her body - to acquire multiple identities through a blend of sculptural recreations and photography. The artist works on the theme of building her own identification with the part of the world where she lives or where she feels she can call home.
In words of Alasdair Foster, “the ‘landscapes’ of artist Cecilia Paredes draw on and articulate an interior experience. Her work with fabric designs began when she moved from Costa Rica to the USA. The lot of the migrant is to become subsumed into the patterns of another culture, another way of life. To survive one must blend in; learn to be something else, someone new. But are we lost to ourselves as we dissolve into the alien landscapes of the new? These are questions raised by her images, not answers given. Form holds the truth; pattern the context. And it is our evolved sense of self-preservation, repurposed to consider the internal life of others, through which we have the possibility of true insight.” The River Within is a performance by Paredes in which she interprets the Ucayali river located on the Amazonian area of Peru. The artist uses a fabric that suggests the drawings of the Shipibo Conibo culture, that are present in their textiles, suggesting the sinuosity of the rivers and by painting it on her skin, she addresses the reading that the locals give to the flow of the river as part of their lives.
The new gallery space is in Manhattan's Upper East Side at 74 East 79th Street, 2D. It will be open to the public Tuesday through Saturday 11 AM - 6 PM and by appointment.
