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Works by Fernando Rodríguez, based on a fictional
alter ego, Francisco de la Cal, are part of En Cada
Barrio Revolucion at the CAC.
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Drive through the streets of Cuba for even a short time and you're bound to see the government slogan "En Cada Barrio Revolución" at least once. Govern-ment propaganda in Cuba is hard to miss. Billboards line Cuba's Autopista, declaring boldly, "The strength of the revolution is the strength of the people" and "Great times call for great sacrifices." "En Cada Barrio Revolución" means "Revolution in each neighborhood."
So it's interesting that Charles Desmarais, director of the Contem-porary Art Center (CAC), borrowed this highly charged, militaristic message as the title for the CAC's current installation of work by Cuban artists. According to Desmarais, some of the artists involved were hesitant about the title. But in English, the phrase takes on a new meaning.
"In a way, these artists have been creating small, artistic revolutions in the communities in which they are staying," he says, referring to the program that brought the artists here in the first place.
Desmarais had the idea to create an exhibit to feature Cuban artists after a recreational trip to Havana in last February. The CAC quickly went about the business of contacting the heads of local and regional university art departments, looking for institutions interested in partnering to create residencies for the visiting Cuban artists. Five schools signed up, each striking its own deal with an artist-in-residence. The participating universities were the University of Cincinnati, Ohio State University, Art Academy of Cincinnati, Univer-sity of Kentucky and Eastern Kentucky University. Residencies were as short as two weeks and as long as 10. Some artists were required to give lectures as part of their contracts; others simply kept office hours for student interaction.
Five artists were chosen: Raúl Cordero, Fernando Rodríguez, Elsa Mora, Luís Gomez and José Toirac. The works on exhibit at the CAC were created during their residencies at the participating universities. The culminating exhibition is part of a series of local events this month celebrating Cuban art in Cincinnati.
At a media reception, Raúl Cordero looked like a Latin Pop star, dressed entirely in fitted black clothes. He explained the thinking behind his multimedia installation La Mujer Perfecta ("The Perfect Woman"). The piece is collaborative, and is something Cordero intends to repeat in various cities. It began in New York, where he recorded himself describing the perfect woman as thoughts came to him, each morning, for six days in a row. He sent the tapes to a police artist who sketched the woman as she was described.
In Cincinnati, Cordero was unable to find a police sketch artist willing to work on the project, so he used an art student to create the sketches. The installation shows video segments of the sketches being created by the artist as we hear Cordero's descriptions.
"What I do most of the time is completed with the viewer," Cordero explains. "The idea of this piece is how art is created with various contributors."
In two weeks he will visit San Francisco to repeat the exercise. "Beauty is different in every city," he notes. "It's all about influences." The work will culminate in Salamanca, Spain, where Cordero intends to display all the finished videos together, in Spanish translation.
Much of Fernando Rodríguez's work centers on a fictional alter ego and sometime muse, Francisco de la Cal. In "Arriba y Abajo" ("Up and Down"), a sculpture he created for the CAC show, Rodríguez shows a hundred or more hand-carved images of Francisco struggling to climb up (or down, depending on which way you look at it) a wooden ladder. The piece deals with the relationship between space and movement. According to Rodríguez, the direction in which the figures move is intentionally unclear.
"With so many people trying to move at once, it will surely collapse," he explains.
Artist Elsa Mora took advantage of the great kilns at Eastern Kentucky University to create ceramic works for the show. Mora, who has had major exhibitions in Chicago, New York and Italy and has participated in several shows internationally as well, has created a piece for the CAC that integrates small ceramic sculptures with a series of black-and-white portraits showing the artist interacting with the objects.
Some of the works have distinctly political influences. Jose Toirac, for instance, created a series of black-and-white Cuban historical and political images paired with American advertising slogans. Over an image of Che Guevara, for instance, we see the Apple Computer logo and tagline "Think Different."
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Cuban artist José A. Toirac merges historical Cuban
images with ad slogans from America in the CAC
show.
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Luís Gomez also has a political flavor to his work. "All my work is about freedom," he says. Gomez's inspiration for a multimedia piece in the exhibit was a recording of Billie Holiday singing "They Can't Take That Away From Me." "Freedom is only inside you. It's not a physical place," he says, "and it's not something that can be taken away from you."
Charles Desmarais sees this show as more than an exhibit. "Because the artists have come here and held residencies at local universities, what results is a cultural exchange that goes beyond shipping paintings from somewhere and putting them on the wall. In a way, the interaction of the five artists with students and communities is more important than the art they're creating."
EN CADA BARRIO REVOLUCION will be on view at the Contemporary Arts Center, 115 E. Fifth St., Downtown, through Jan. 13.
