An Inherent View of the World
“I remember the first time I had sex—I kept the receipt.”
-Groucho Marx
MIAMI, FL—Mindy Solomon Gallery is pleased to present an installation by Juana Valdes. Valdes explores the notion of culture, place, and chronology in her installation entitled ‘An Inherent View of the World.’
The exhibition will be on view October 23rd-December 11th at Mindy Solomon Gallery’s new location in Little River, 8397 NE 2nd Avenue, Miami.
In the gallery’s Project Space, Juana Valdes exhibits her work ‘An Inherent View of the World.’ She creates a lavish, almost baroque accumulation of items which often get relegated to the discard pile when people are in the process of de-accessioning the so-called “dust collectors” of their past, decorative and sometimes utilitarian objects that might have been purchased on a family vacation or inherited from a relative and simply don’t belong in the next phase of life.
“The truth beyond the fetish’s glimmering mirage is the relationship of laborer to product; it is the social account of how that object came to be. In this view every commodity, beneath the mantle of its pricetag, is a hieroglyph ripe for deciphering, a riddle whose solution lies in the story of the worker who made it and the conditions under which it was made,” writes Leah Hager Cohen in Glass, Paper, Beans: Revolutions on the Nature and Value of Ordinary Things.
In the words of writer Julie Chae: “Juana Valdes invites the viewer to ponder the history of global trade through the display of china and other domestic wares collected for her show. A multi-media installation artist trained in Western post-Modern philosophy and with backgrounds in sculpture and printmaking, Valdes presents a Duchampian project in which the artist’s selected objects become the art. Each of the domestic wares presented embodies the cultural values of its time and place, reflecting aesthetic and economic decisions made by the manufacturer and by various consumers throughout its existence. Having exhibited art installations with maps, ships, sails and various other media in the past, Valdes continues with her latest project to explore transculturation, pigmentocracy, history, and memory.”
Discarding material possessions is never easy and each re-acqauintance with something long-forgotten prompts questions and memories. How was this once used, who made it, where did I find it, and will someone else find it again? The boxes are left at the second-hand store and reassembled without a thought of the original intent of the previous owner. It is here that Juana Valdes does her research, scouring the shelves for treasures past their prime, blowing off the dust and re-examining their value.
Valdes invites the viewer to question their own object experience and the movement of material goods as a commodity, encompassing cross-cultural populations and historical transitions.
About Juana Valdes
Juana Valdes has been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions in the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe, including at the Lower Eastside Print Shop, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Center for Book Arts, and was a finalist for the 2011- 2012 CINTAS Fellowship Finalist Exhibition in Visual Arts, Miami Dade College. She has participated in residency and exhibited her work in the following spaces: Hudson River Museum, Art in General, El Museo del Barrio, White Box Gallery, Bronx River Art Center, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Paul Sharpe Contemporary Art, Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator and Nohra Haime Gallery. She has also been active in national and international residencies, including: VAN Artist-in-Residency, the European Ceramic Work Center in the Netherlands, the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Artist Residency at the Center for Book Arts,
the Lower East Side Print Shop, the Smack Mellon Studio Program, and the P.S.1 International Studio Residency Program. She has received support from numerous grants and fellowships including the New York Foundation for the Arts, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Joan Mitchell Grant, Cuban Artist Fund Grant and The Netherland-American Foundation. She holds an MFA in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts, her BFA in sculpture from Parsons School of Design, and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She was born in Cuba and is a US citizen. Valdes is Assistant Professor of Printmaking at University of Massachusetts Amherst in the Department of Art.
