Drawing on imagery and sources that range from Christianity to santeria,
Alom's photographic space becomes very ritualized and fetishized. Allowing
your imagination to be pushed into the willful instability of significance
that lies between his assembled items is like participating in an overly
sumptuous feast; it is both attractive and revolting at the same time. At
times he prints with heavily saturated colors and then offsets the visual
glut by printing others in cool gray, scratched images.
Alom seems most interested in arousing the viewer, without letting that
arousal coagulate into want. Not always convincing, it is nonetheless curiously
compelling to follow as this work attempts to invest the viewer with the
intense headiness of desire itself.
The large, black and white collograph prints which make up Belkis Ayon's
Restlessness series are part of a narrative cycle that revolves around the
myth and history of a secret society called the Abakua. Founded in the early
1800's, this all male society functioned as an underground resistance movement
to the Spanish rule. Eschewing females to the point that interlopers of
the opposite sex were put to death, the Abakuá are an amalgamation
of spiritual sources brought to the island from Africa.
Belkis' prints are made up of essentialized figures that float in an eerie,
writhing landscape enacting the stories of the Abakua. Black and white are
used as natural corollary to the collographic printing technique, but function
in a symbolic domain as well. The principle feature of this artist's work
is her depiction of the symbols and rites of the Abakuá. She creates
a world of storytelling that is odd and beautiful. It is an intricate play
of pat- tern and repetition in a very shallow pictorial space, a fusion
of animal, plant and human into a hybrid glyph. |
Belkis Ayon, "La Sentencia," colografia, 37
x 27", 1993.
Belkis Ayon, "Yo, te di el Poder," colografia,
37 x 27", 1993. |
