the exhibition opening was really nice, it felt weird as it was my first in lima after more than 10 years of absence. people really liked the pieces, i received many comments about how moving and warm the show was and how the work mad them think about their own connection to objects, loss and their loved ones. i also sold a few pieces.

the fact that many of my students attended made it extra special for me, it really was a moment of celebration. i´m making a video with the gallery installation shots but in the meantime, here´s a sneak peek at one fo the wall installations, it´s 'the absent father' piece.

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this is the slideshow made for my exhibition... it´s too full of memories, almost painful to watch, but there´s also a lot of love and echoes of a beautiful and unique family in it...

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my opening is this coming friday april 20th and i´m still not finished, today i´m trying to finish everything but i doubt i will...

the last one is still in progress, i´m not sure i will be able to foinish it, but i´m really liking how it´s helping tell the story of the child...

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See the full gallery on Posterous

making 'the house' has been a very long and laborious process, and in terms of the experience itself, it became me feeling i was playing house as a child. the house has three floors and i had a box made for each floor, following the house blueprints. i covered the inside of the house with dad´s ledger book pages and the outside with photocopies of my grandpa's anatomy books. i went to the house several times to scavenge for objects; at first i thought this would be an easy task but i soon realized not every object worked and also, the sizes of the objects that the 'walls' of the house allowed was pretty small. this is the first floor finished, with photos of details, i´m now working on finishing the other two floors.

the other piece is a box i made for my brother george. the toy soldier was his, i've placed him as if he´s protecting my brother. it´s not finished, i´m still thinking if i should add a silver torito on top of the box or not...

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and now the series is complete...

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i like it but it makes me sad... below is a detail, i used beeswax for the background and added black lace

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i think this one´s finished now...

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both my parents were absent figures in my childhood; i have no memory of them but i do remember my nanny, gudelia was her name. because dad worked, i have even less of a sense of him during my childhood, i do remember seeing my mom here and there. but my father´s absence went beyond his physical presence; he was not present as a father much, even when he was there, he was actually somewhere else. i wonder what his dreams were, i think my parents got married way too young and for the wrong reasons and that made my father distance himself from us. once he told me he wanted to be an artist but it was unthinkable in his time and for his family, he had the soul of a poet, a suffering one...

i used pages from dad´s ledger books for these pieces, and again, it felt like i was scribbling all over his important work. it felt wrong. even though i rationalized it, i could not help feeling this would get me in trouble.

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right now, it´s hard for me to photograph this piece as a whole, so here it is in three parts.

the piece has many layers but i´m not sure that´s noticeable, however, i know they´re there..

bantam roosters and chicken were a big part of my childhood, my grandparents kept some as pets andi i spent long hours looking at them, trying to figure them out. i learned their language and played with them. it was beautiful to wake up to the roosters crowing. 

the garden´s most important plant, in my eyes, was the jasmine vine; the smell of jasmine was so powerful and it seemed to me, stornger at night. the floor outside my grandparent´s room was always covered in jasmine flowers...

i feel a huge nostalgia for it all...

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post update: i was testing uploading a photo straight from instagram to my blog and it worked. i´m set on finishing painting my empanada today no matter what. just taking a short break to calm down this nasty back pain i´ve had all day... 

and yet another update: here´s a photo i took with my camera (as opposed to my ipod) of the finished piece

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i have almost finished this piece and i´m quite happy with it. the very ornate frame is one i bought in my recent trip to cusco and it mirrors the ones used in the escuela cusqueña painting schoool from the viceroyalty. my father is from cusco so that´s the more direct connection but i´m also using it as it gives me the feeling of my very surreal childhood. i used very muted colours for the piece, like the colours of my dreams maybe, and also of a distant childhood. the frame has about 5 layers of paint and patinas which may not be obvious but without them i would not have achieved that very beautiful old and stained look.

the box is covered with pages from an old english anatomy book for school children my brither rescued for me, it was being trashed by a family who was moving away. the paper was then gessoed and i added a patina  and then i used my new electric sanding tool (love it!) to sand it which gives it a better, in a way used up texture.

this is a detail of my little portrait inserted in a page from a medicine book, i added a microscope slide with jasmine flowers, the smell of jasmine from my grandparent´s house is still so present in my memories and actually, the old jasmine plant is still there!

i chose one of my grandfather´s surgery tools to place inside the box, below my portrait. i had a complicated childhood, physically and emotionally and that medical instrument reminds me of that..

here´s the piece with both parts placed together; i still don´t know if they will be hanged from the wall or if i will add hinges and place them on a table.

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i have almost finished with this part of the box for the child

i have had a very long process with this piece, trying to find the right textures and colours and making sure the material spoke properly

using dad´s old ledger books, like i said before, felt pretty weird, it was hard to use the electric sanding tool on the layer of paper i had collaged to the box...

i also had to cut this x-ray print from my grandfather´s stash, i had to fit it in the little slide frame...

i´m quite happy with the way it´s looking and feeling, i´m now working on the second part which is giving me a bit of a headache still...

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i've changed this piece so much in the past few days... here´s one more option. i´m now turning it into a diptych, i might hinge them-so many possibilities floating in my head...

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i just realized my exhibition opens on friday, april 13th, which means i have about one and a half months to complete the work and i´m beginning school again in a week.

...

while i am stressed, i´m going to choose to be more practical and organize my time to the minute so everything works out as it should. also, i cannot begin any more new pieces or i´ll never finish the work i have started already.

breathe!

oh, and i think the name for the exhibition is decided: 'god only knows'; it´s the title of a beach boys song that takes me back to my childhood and especially to my brother george, he loved the beach boys, the lyrics are also appropriate for what the exhibition is about:

if you should ever leave me
though life would still go on believe me
the world could show nothing to me
so what good would living do me

when he died i listened to this song non stop and cried forever...

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yesterday i took a canvas piece i had basically just played with and experimented on when i first arrived to lima and stenciled it with the symbols i´m using now.

i also took some pages from dad´s ledger books and stenciled them too.

as i did this i could not help having the feeling you get when you´re a child and you get in trouble from scribbling all over dad´s work papers... i felt i was getting in trouble for doing this, it was a weird yet pleasant feeling...

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this is from an afternoon i spent in williamsburg putting my website stickers everywhere... it was fun and i´m glad i wasn´t arrested for doing it. i just recovered the photo from myspace, i´m trying to consolidate all my work here...

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this box in progress is a series of happy accidents (or maybe it´s me paying attention to things around me...), the image of the child is from a bad xerox transfer (but i still saved it for some reason), the book page is one i cut an eye for another piece out of (i saved it because i felt it could be useful somehow), the microscope slides are my grandpa´s, i found a whole box of them in his house in my latest visit there, the flowers inside it are jasmine and this other one (forgotten the name) that grew in my grandparent´s home, the lace is similar to the one from my toddler dresses that i bought yesterday without knowing for what and the sea urchin was found by me in our long gone beach house... it´s more evocative than trying to describe an actual memory. i´m trying to build poetic images of memory.

the book page is also me remembering my grandpa and his medical books, the ones i grew looking at over and over again...

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swallows lived in the inside patio; i would often find babies that had fallen from their nests lying on the floor and rescue them. i would pick them up and put them in little boxes which i took with me everywhere i went but they usually died...

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