Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME
Here’s an image of El barrio on my studio wall, in progress. El barrio is a dimensional illustration made with repurposed and found paperboard and cardboard, gouache, acrylic, markers, intaglio and relief printmaking, and glue. I completed it in May 2024 for Arts@theIntersection.
EL Barrio on my studio wall in progress with some printmaking samples
Twenty years ago, when I was an art student in Madrid, I lived in a studio apartment in Lavapies, an historic, international neighborhood just a short walk from the Cine Dore filmoteca, where I had the best part time gig as a subtitle machine operator. I have almost no visual record of my life there. To illustrate my neighborhood, I’ve tried to walk through my mind. In that walk I mostly get visual fragments—unreliable, but occasionally still potent, for evoking a feeling of the place.
I’m increasingly interested in what we as makers can still access from our own sensory memories, without the interference of digital media. Our own digital records could be a kind of extension of our memories, but how much more digital media are we consuming and drawing on to inform us about the world that’s made by someone else, or without any human sensory experience involved? At some point in the creation of Masheene, we had only our imagination, memory, and the materials at hand—paper, paint/markers, glue and cutting tools—to inform our decisions. It’s wild to think that twenty years ago, that would not have been remarkable.
El Barrio,2024 Dimensional illustration with repurposed paper, cardboard, book board, acrylic, gouache, intaglio and relief printmaking, and markers Image courtesy of Alexis Saba