A new exhibit, “Hilo y Tierra: What We Share,” opened at the Curfman Gallery March 10, exploring the complexities of what the word “Home” means within a multicultural experience.
The exhibit showcases two artists, Tony Ortega and Daniela Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas. Both come from distinct cultural backgrounds and work with vastly different mediums yet share a similar experience navigating divided cultural identities, each exploring this divide in their work.
“We liked the idea of exhibiting Tony and Daniela together because they shared a lot of common themes, but two in particular: growing up with a divided cultural experience and asking questions about what ‘Home’ meant for themselves,” Lory Student Center Arts Program Manager Doug Sink wrote in an email.
The words “Hilo y Tierra,” translate to “thread and earth,” and each represent the respective artists.
“We went with Hilo from Tony’s materials, and Tierra from my materials, but also, our focus is kind of on the idea of home, the idea of where we are, the places that we inhabit and, most importantly, what we share is so vital to understand this work,” said DMFCV, who requested to be referred to by her initials in lieu of a last name.
DMFCV’s ceramic sculptures incorporate a variety of materials, including porcelain, gold leaf and soils from around the world. Her sculptures focus on different flora from Colombia as their subjects.
“I am an immigrant, so I focus on that longing for that home, and that looking for that stability,” DMFCV said. “Plants and flowers, … they are completely rooted in their place, and they don’t have these questions of identity. They don’t have this fear of, like, ‘Do I belong here, or do I belong somewhere else?’ … They are that source of strength that I am looking for in my own life.”
DMFCV said creating her sculptures is a lengthy process. After getting inspiration and doing extensive research, she sculpts the basic form of the piece out of a solid body of clay, then cuts it in half and hollows the piece out. She said that doing so symbolizes her own struggles with identity.
“It reflects that fear that I am losing my Colombian identity, so it mirrors that ‘scooping out’ of that essence,” DMFCV said. “I am, in a way, fearing that I am losing my Colombian essence.”
From there, the more detail-oriented parts of construction begin. To capture the realistic look she wants from her pieces, DMFCV applies an intricate assortment of glazes and fires the sculpture several times — a process she said she has strong feelings toward.
“Glazing is the worst thing in the world, in my opinion,” DMFCV said. “It is a bane upon my existence.”
Glazing is risky and easy to mess up. While glazes can add texture and color needed to make a realistic effect, once fired, they can turn out blotchy or over-exaggerated, and colors can be lost altogether.
To get around this, DMFCV creates hundreds of “test tiles,” upon which she applies different combinations of glazes. After firing them, she’s able to see how different glazes interact, and she then can recreate the desired effects on the final piece.
“I’m very meticulous about detail,” DMFCV said. “I really want it to push the idea that this is no longer just an object that looks like something real. This is a real flower; it is breathing; it is looking for light.”
The exhibit’s other featured artist, Ortega, utilizes the much different mediums of paint, printing and digital design. His work focuses on mixing pop culture with traditional Mexican culture.
“I use humor and mix it with juxtaposing symbols, icons, Western art history, (and) combine it with Mexican history and Mexican symbols with American symbols and iconography,” Ortega said. “The work is about how cultures come together or how they converge or how they overlap or how they contrast.”
After getting inspiration, Ortega said he searches for images online that he thinks he’ll be able to combine, and from there, begins mixing the images together using Photoshop.
“I have to do a lot of what I would call digital collaging — mixing, overlapping, cutting out, cloning — in order to bring them together,” Ortega said.
Ortega then begins the process of transcribing the image. This starts by creating a film positive, which gets exposed to a light-sensitive plate. Where light passes through, the surface becomes hard, and where light doesn’t, the surface remains soft and water soluble.
While both artists are quite different, DMFCV explained that the true focus of the exhibit was their commonality.
“The exhibition is about what we share, not what divides us,” DMFCV said. “We share so much with each other, not just Tony and me, but people.”
Reach Maxine Bilodeau at entertainment@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.
