Maria Lau

Through the Camera Lens: Views of Utopia in the Tropics

November 2, 2005

Excerpt from: Through the Camera Lens: Views of Utopia in the Tropics

by Alejandro Anreus

... Viajeros photographers have come and gone and continue to visit the island. This latest group of Viajeros not only currently includes North Americans but also Cubans by birth or heritage who return or visit for the first time in search of roots. This exhibition, consisting of both printed images and videos, is not a survey charged with essentialisms, but rather a series of fragments that together produce a fuller and complex picture. Diversity is to be found in methodology, medium and aesthetic vision among all the artists...What emerges from this kaleidoscopic mosaic is this entity, Cuba, where the people are warm and open, even proud, as well as distant, closed and defeated. 

In an exhibit with more than fifty artists with strong work; eight videos and countless photographs, over a dozen photographs and one video have burned themselves into my pupils; formally, conceptually and emotionally these images pack a wallop.

…Capitolio by Maria Lau evokes both the perpetual movement of a city and the ghost-like presences of a monument charged with the burden of history.

...These viajeros photographers are sharing with us through this exhibition "evidence not only of what's there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world." Cuba is evaluated in these images and videos, and we encounter the utopia of the tropics that should have been, could have been and will never be.

 


Through the Camera Lens: Views of Utopia in the Tropics

November 2, 2005

Excerpt from: Through the Camera Lens: Views of Utopia in the Tropics

by Alejandro Anreus

... Viajeros photographers have come and gone and continue to visit the island. This latest group of Viajeros not only currently includes North Americans but also Cubans by birth or heritage who return or visit for the first time in search of roots. This exhibition, consisting of both printed images and videos, is not a survey charged with essentialisms, but rather a series of fragments that together produce a fuller and complex picture. Diversity is to be found in methodology, medium and aesthetic vision among all the artists...What emerges from this kaleidoscopic mosaic is this entity, Cuba, where the people are warm and open, even proud, as well as distant, closed and defeated. 

In an exhibit with more than fifty artists with strong work; eight videos and countless photographs, over a dozen photographs and one video have burned themselves into my pupils; formally, conceptually and emotionally these images pack a wallop.

…Capitolio by Maria Lau evokes both the perpetual movement of a city and the ghost-like presences of a monument charged with the burden of history.

...These viajeros photographers are sharing with us through this exhibition "evidence not only of what's there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation of the world." Cuba is evaluated in these images and videos, and we encounter the utopia of the tropics that should have been, could have been and will never be.