Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Paloma Contreras Lomas sometimes incorporates large scale drawing into her practice. For Contreras, drawing is a deeply personal and corporeal exercise that she relates to writing and narration. Her charcoal drawing Bugs Bunny Behind a Mesophile Bush features a gigantic hat providing shelter to the simultaneously identifiable and unidentifiable cartoon character hiding behind a wild bus.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Paloma Contreras Lomas has frequently used animals as metaphors in her work. This work’s title, Cimarrón , is the Spanish word for an untamed animal, the wild vegetation that grows in the open, or a runaway slave. Cimarrón is part of a larger series in which the artist turned scaled-up Mexican hats into meticulously hallucinatory landscapes.

Installation (Installation)

Aqua by Fernando Palma Rodríguez is an installation formed by four gourds and one movement detector that activates them. Once put in motion, the gourds open and close hinged hands that are cut from their bodies, catalyzing a sophisticated, choreographed conversation among them. Following Indigenous notions of personhood, Palma Rodríguez grants agency to ordinary objects and therefore the ability to relate to others—humans as well as non-humans.

Photography (Photography)

In Amantes (Lovers) Juan Carlos points his lens at his own environment, his underground (literally) studio in Havana. A beautiful and intimate image of a seedy yet casual scene of two lovers in the background foreshadowed by a beautiful young woman smoking a joint in the foreground, a very powerful and not too subtle political representation of the current realities and truth of youth life in Havana. Juan Carlos Alom is an artist known for his documentary photography of Cuba’s subcultures and underground scenes.