Part 2: Some Strange Power
Featuring the work of Christina Barrera, Amy Bravo, Anna Cone, Amorelle Jacox, and Pol Morton, Some Strange Power presents a plurality of way findings and paths into intimate repossession of self, thus participating in the creation of a greater heterogeneous, expanded human, mystical and metaphysical narrative linking the secular to the body, the body to the matter, the matter to the cosmos and the cosmos to a wider beyond. The artists in Some Strange Power share in common questions deeply grounded in the position of self; as a physical body, as a carrier of legacy, as a spatial and temporal witness, as a mechanism, as an active participant in the mapping of a journey which encompasses more than itself.
Christina Barrera
Christina Barrera’s work hybridizes processes and forms in an attempt to devour the imperialist culture under which we live and pull it into the service of the artistic lineage and traditions she’s been denied. She uses a wide variety of materials to make drawings, prints, fiber works, sculptures, and paintings, and often the works lie somewhere in between. She sources from and weaves together South and Central American traditions of craft, figuration, and abstraction along with national symbols and craft from settler-colonial traditions. The work slips between English and Spanish and the interplay between multiple meanings, connotations, and translations keeps the language fluid and unstable in its exact meaning as Barrera processes issues of liberation, repression, and the weight of history.
instragram: @_ghostina_
Amy Bravo
Amy Bravo's mixed media paintings, drawings and sculptures attempt to reconcile the family—be it a found, queer family, or blood relatives. Challenged with ancestral conflict, the complications of US/Cuba relations and her physical and cultural distance from the island she hails from, Bravo's large-scale work seeks to build an impossible utopia in the vague outline of Cuba. This utopian desire hinges on the question of what it means to love someone you do not always agree with. What does it mean to love unconditionally? What toll does it take, and who picks up the pieces?
instragram: @_amybravo_
Anna Cone
Anna Cone is an Aquarius Sun, Libra Moon, Capricorn rising with Venus in Pisces. Her work consists of spells in response to trauma, systems of power and abuses of power. Cone's work gives materiality to unseen labor and shared devalued knowledge, or other ways of knowing, which were often disseminated from kitchens, baths and other “feminine" and domestic spaces. She calls on practices, and the re-appropriation of those practices for the sake of empowerment, including magic, astrology, ritual, embodiment, baking and craft. Her materials include jello, hair, kitchen ingredients and found object assemblages which hold the charges of complex histories, brought to the present through film and performance.
instragram: @annacone
Amorelle Jacox
Amorelle Jacox’s paintings are born out of a profound sense of cosmic free-fall. Tables and black holes hover in a realm where slippage between figure and object and space probes questions about the limits of body and knowledge. Where metaphor pries open depths of metaphysical inquiry; and amorphous ellipses find their individual natures in relation to each other. That, with a singular brushstroke, the sky’s stomach might fold into a plate, and that plate might slip between the days.
instragram: @amorellejacox
Pol Morton
Pol Morton’s work explores their queer, nonbinary, and chronicaly il body. Their paintings take on intimate, quotidian moments — laying in bed, taking a bath, shaving over a scar — and depict them larger than life, giving them a momentary monumentality. Painting from an immersive first-person point of view, Morton explores the dissociation from and inhibition of the body.Their oil paintings function as self-portraits, colaging personal and domestic low-relief debris, such as used q-tips, bundles of hair, and curtains, building a visceral reality that is playful, humorous, and idiosyncratic.
instragram: @polmorton