Ken Gonzales-Day
Hector Dionicio Mendoza
Coyota/e, 2021
Mixed media (cardboard, glue, epoxy, wood, spray paint)
96 x 156 x 48 in
Hector Dionicio Mendoza
Hercules / El Mundo, 2019-2023
Mixed media (cardboard, bark, wood, metal, soil, plastic, found fabric)
98 x 48 x 60 in
Edra Soto
Sol Centro I, 2023
Sintra, wood, viewfinders, inkjet prints
108.5 x 66.25 x 4.5 in
Edra Soto
Sol Centro II, 2023
Sintra, wood, viewfinder, inkjet print
99.5 x 69 x 4.5 in
Edra Soto
Entrelazadas, I, II, and III, 2023
Sintra, wood, steel, and paint
138 x 20.8 x 12 in Pillar on base
24.24 x 24.24 in Base
Ken Gonzales-Day
Erased Lynchings V, 2023
Erased Lynching Series, 2002 - present, Edition 2 of 6
Archival inkjet on rag paper mounted on cardstock
6 x 4.5 in each
12 x 15 x 2 in Framed
Vian Sora
Abzu, 2023
Oil and mixed media on canvas
84 x 350 in
84 x 70 in each panel (5)
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles | Art Basel Miami Beach: Nova | Booth: N19
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles presents a dynamic installation for Art Basel Miami Beach’s Nova sector with works by Edra Soto, Ken Gonzales-Day and Hector Dionicio Mendoza. All three Latinx artists use landscape as a lens through which to explore themes of migration, issues of colonialism and the erasure of history, expressed through sculpture, photography, and mixed media.
Edra Soto’s GRAFT is an ongoing series of architectural interventions consisting of representations of rejas (wrought iron fences and screens) and quiebrasoles (concrete breeze blocks), the decorative elements present in mid-twentieth century Puerto Rican vernacular architecture. The work uses textural elements, colors, and designs that pay homage to the facades of homes in Puerto Rico. By incorporating viewfinders that reveal images of the local landscape, domestic still-lifes, and personal ephemera, Soto adds an element of photographic performativity that engages audiences. Overarchingly, these sculptures make visible the role that African diasporic traditions have played and continue to play in Puerto Rican architecture. Yet perhaps equally important is Soto’s personal exploration of home, where the elements of GRAFT serve as a container for her own relationship to home.
The images in Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynchings series (2002-ongoing) are derived from appropriated lynching postcards and archival materials in which Gonzales-Day has removed the lynch victim and the ropes. This conceptual gesture is intended to direct the viewers’ attention not upon the lifeless body of the victim, but upon the mechanisms of lynching themselves: the crowd, the spectacle, the photographer, and to even consider the impact of flash photography upon this dismal past. The series strives to make the invisible visible and seeks to expose racially motivated lynching and vigilantism was a more widespread practice in the American West than was believed. The absences or empty spaces in the photographs become emblematic of the forgotten history made more palpable considering the recent events surrounding the resurgence of the noose as means of intimidation and instilling fear everywhere from the workplace to the schoolyard.
The sculptural works by Hector Dionicio Mendoza are informed and guided by his personal experiences of the US/Mexico border region, an area in constant flux. Themes of migration and the environment as well as the geographies of place, memory, identity, and the visualization of immigrant stories are consistent throughout his work. Mendoza grew up with a great appreciation for the importance of faith, ritual, and alternative healing traditions as practiced by his grandfather, a fifth-generation curandero (shaman) of Afro-Caribeño lineage. In Mexico as well as Central and South America, the curandera/o plays an important role to many people embarking on the long and challenging journey to El Norte (The North/United States), providing blessings and protection before they depart in search of a better way of life. This ancestral framework forms the foundation for Mendoza's ambitious and expansive multimedia practice, with its surprising explorations and unconventional use of natural, organic, synthetic, and recycled materials one would encounter on a migration such as cardboard, soil and tree branches, bread, plastic, and textiles.
Media Contact: Brianna Bakke, Director | mobile: 1.323.448.0147 | email: gallery@luisdejesus.com
LOCATION:
Miami Beach Convention Center
1901 Convention Center Drive
Miami Beach, FL 33139
DATES & TIMES
Vip And Press Preview-
By invitation: Wednesday, December 6th, from 9:30am to 7pm, and Thursday, December 7th, from 11am to 7pm
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC:
Friday, December 8, 2023, 11am to 6pm
Saturday, December 9, 2023, 11am to 6pm
Sunday, December 10, 2023, 11am to 6pm
Vian Sora: Abzu | Art Basel Miami Beach: Meridians, M5
For Art Basel Miami Beach’s Meridians sector, Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to present a monumental new painting by Iraqi artist Vian Sora, titled Abzu.
Amidst vivid hues and vibrant coloration, Sora’s paintings divulge historical, environmental, and psychological landscapes. Informed by her personal experience and global perspective of life in the Middle East and abroad, Sora uses the element of water as a symbol of flux, resilience, and rebirth amongst shifting attributes—exposing human necessity and vulnerability. The title “Abzu” refers to the primeval subterranean sea, a middle realm inhabited by deities, that is the source of fresh water. In Sumerian and Akkadian mythologies, the mystical underground aquifers were believed to provide water to lakes, rivers, and wells, springing forth regenerative powers. The painting addresses the lost fertility below the alluvial fields that were once able to sustain Iraq.
Water’s ability to both nourish and destroy is a characteristic Sora examines alongside themes of entropy, healing, archetypal experiences, and natural occurrences that know no borders. Through an insightful use of iconography that yields both ancient and modern connotations, Sora employs early Mesopotamian aesthetics that also parallel abstract figurative zeitgeist, achieving an uncanny visceral notion of time and nature as cyclical. Working with oil, acrylic, and raw pigments on canvas, Sora’s approach to the medium insinuates a struggle with history and its intersection with nature. Dense with ideas and the distillation of experiences, her atmospheric surfaces are layered with optical ambiguities that allow her to express untold emotional landscapes.
Sora’s works ruminate on the organic and man-made forces that have impacted the environment. Water, and its collision with fire, is a recurring theme in her work and stems from the dried-up marshes and rivers in Iraq—the result of numerous wars and human abuse. However, this phenomenon is not strictly limited to Iraq, as evidenced by current threats of rivers and other bodies of water drying up from global warming, diversion, wildfires, mismanagement, and the displacement of human population. Echoing the way in which earthen matter is recycled post-tectonic collision, Sora believes society oscillates within a cycle of entropy and regeneration. Like nature’s ability to replenish beauty amongst the detritus, we too emerge to rebuild and survive.
Vian Sora (b. 1974, Baghdad, IQ) received a BS from Al Mansour University in Baghdad, Iraq in 2000, and an MBA from Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky in 2012. She also studied printmaking at the Istanbul Museum of Graphic Art in Istanbul, Turkey in 2007. In 2025, Sora will be the subject of a survey exhibition being organized by the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in Santa Barbara, CA, and the Asia Society in Houston, TX. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally including the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Sharjah Biennale, Sharjah, UAE; KMAC Triennial, Louisville, KY; The Shands Collection, Louisville, KY; Grinnell Museum of Art, Grinnell, Iowa; Istanbul Museum of Graphic Art, Istanbul, Turkey; Japanese Foundation Culture Center, Ankara, Turkey; Baghdad Art International Art Festival in Iraq, among others.
These newcomer galleries from Cairo, Warsaw, and beyond, are rising stars on the scene.
In Luis de Jesus’s powerful booth, three Latinx artists explore the landscape in relationship to migration, historicism, and the legacy of colonialism in works crossing sculpture, photography, and mixed media. Artist Edra Soto’s series of “Graft” sculptures reconsider decorative architectural elements found in mid-20th century Puerto Rico, namely rejas (wrought iron fences) and quiebrasoles (concrete breeze blocks). In a searing series of postcard-sized images displayed on one wall of the booth, Ken Gonzales-Day has performed interventions on historic scenes of violence in the state of California, erasing the victims and leaving behind only the perpetrators. Meanwhile, Hector Dionicio Mendoza has created a large-scale sculptural wall-work of a coyote-human hybrid. Beyond the Nova presentation,Luis De Jesus is also showing a luminous monumental painting by Iraqi-American artist Vian Sora in the Meridians section of the fair.
