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July Issue 2006
Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC, Features Works by Juan Manuel Echavarria
The
Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at
Greensboro, NC, is pleased to present the exhibition, Juan
Manuel Echavarria: Mouths of Ash. Organized by Laurel Reuter
for the North Dakota Museum of Art, this is the first one-person
museum exhibition of Echavarria's work in this country. The exhibit
will be on view through Sept. 10, 2006.
After thirty years as a writer of serious fiction, Echavarria said he "was drowning in words." While driving through Bogotá one day, he saw street merchants displaying their wares on old battered mannequins, to which the shoppers seemed oblivious. But to Echavarria the mannequins took on the semblance of tens of thousands of Colombia's people wrought helpless, homeless, and violent by fifty years of civil war. These damaged lives normally went unnoticed by privileged citizens of Bogotá, buffered by wealth and security systems. But the shoppers, themselves among the dispossessed, found the mannequins quite normal, Echavarria noticed.
Out of that brief moment came Retratos/Portraits his first series of photographs. As a writer, Echavarria had used metaphor to convey thoughts and feelings difficult to simply describe. Now, as the artist has said, "Somehow in taking these pictures of broken mannequins, which became my first series, I understood the direction my art should take. I would explore violence through metaphor." Laurel Reuter has called Echavarria's work, "a visual requiem to his country."
Echavarria also decided
to organize each body of work in response to artistic and cultural
traditions. For example, they are based upon the formal portrait.
Another body of series, Corte de flolero/Flower Vase Cut
references botanical prints from late eighteenth century Spanish
expeditions to the New World. In the gallery setting, the black
and white photographs appear as a row of elegant, botanical prints,
one flower to a page. Gradually the viewer sees that the exquisite
illustrations of flowers are made from human bones. Each page
is titled at the bottom in old-fashioned script. The artist gave
every flower its scientific name plus a second name that describes
his personal response to the violence represented by the bone
flowers. For example, Maxillaria Vorx, carries the scientific
name in Latin for an orchid, Maxillaria, followed by vorix,
Latin for voracious. Violence is voracious.
Following his first three photo-based bodies of work, Echavarria
turned to video. The piece from which the title of the exhibition
comes - Bocas de Ceniza / Mouths of Ash - is a collection
of stories in the form of songs. It refers to an Ash Wednesday
when the Spanish entered Colombia through the mouth of the Magdalena
River. The river is the depository of countless bodies of Colombians
killed in continuing acts of violence. In Mouths of Ash,
the artist collects stories in the form of songs composed by individuals
who have survived massacres. Like bards of old, they sing in public
- in this case, directly into the artist's camera.
Echavarria often speaks of his desire to give voice to the voiceless. In Mouths of Ash, he is present only as the sympathetic listener behind the camera lens as these Afro-Colombians at the bottom of society compose songs of mourning. With great eloquence, each sings his or her own dirge of fear and despair. What is remarkable about Mouths of Ash - and Echavarria's work in general - is that the artist does not sentimentalize nor trivialize his subjects. Rather, he manages to draw out what is behind these faces: paradoxically, the unspeakable here conveyed through song.
Juan Manuel Echavarria: Mouths of Ash was organized for the North Dakota Museum of Art by its director and chief curator, Laurel Reuter, with funding from The Andy Warhol Foundation. A bilingual catalogue with three critical essays, an interview with the artist by Laurel Reuter is available.
For further information
check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Museum at
336/334-5770 or at (www.weatherspoon.uncg.edu).
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