Haunted I

Overview

Voloshyn Gallery is honored to present Haunted I – the first of two exhibitions co-curated by Gean Moreno and Omar Lopez-Chahoud.

Haunted I brings together four artists — Minia Biabiany, Christian Lagata, Harold Mendez, and Jonathan Sanchez Noa — whose work is permeated by strong traces of histories that have often been repressed by the mainstream; works, in other words, that turn the ways in which they may be haunted by historical ghosts into potent conceptual and visual counterproposals that address the blind spots of dominant narratives, in order to enlarge the very ways in which we define ourselves. These artists often work with materials that feel charged, emanating engulfing vibes, conjuring entire landscapes, and different ways of looking at the world.

Minia Biabiany is a Guadeloupe-based artist. Her videos and installations layer images, sound, everyday rituals, written and spoken text in order to meditate on human beings relationships to natural environments and the relationships of these environments to the historical processes that have defined the Caribbean Basin with its long colonial and now decolonial trajectories. Biabiany has held one-person exhibitions at Magasin des Horizons in Grenoble, France; La Verrière in Brussels, Belgium; and SIGNALS art center in Malmö, Sweden. She participated in the X Berlin Biennale.

Based in Madrid, Christian Lagata is an artist whose work explores the tensions between the material realities found in industrial zones and terrains vagues and the different forms of “familiarity” (mnemonic, functional, aesthetic) that we establish with them. Beyond the logic of the objet trouvé, Lagata’s work explores in certain elements in these environments the traces of their interactions with humans, rethinking their status as “leftovers” or “residue.” Lagata has participated in exhibitions at La Casa Encendida and Centro Dos de Mayo, both in Madrid; CAAC in Seville; and Mira Forum in Porto, Portugal.

Harold Mendez is a first-generation American of Colombian and Mexican descent. Beyond exploring stories of immigrant experience, his work engages the long arc of hemispheric history, from ancestral cosmologies to the diasporic knowledges that form such an important part of New World cultures. Working in photography, sculpture, and installation, Mendez’s objects explore cultural memory, ritual, and transnational experiences. The porous borders between fiction and truth, visibility and absence, material bluntness, and poetic moods run through his work, making a case for the articulation of complex narratives as the necessary outcome of the culturally rich and deeply stratified spaces of the Americas. Mendez has had recent shows at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus; ICA Miami; Commonwealth and Council in LA; and PATRON in Chicago.

Jonathan Sanchez Noa is a multidisciplinary artist working with drawing, installation, and sculpture. He creates artworks that examine how histories of colonial extractivism have impacted notions of race, identity, and climate. He utilizes Cuban tobacco as a medium to reconstruct narratives of displacement in relation to cultural and religious significance. He earned his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2020 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023. Recent exhibitions of his work include Once at Cleve Carney Museum of Art, Chicago, IL (2023); Rastros en el tiempo at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center, New York, NY (2022); and Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling at Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark (2021).

Opening Reception: Sat Apr 6th, 2024, 6 - 8 PM

April 6th – May 18th, 2024

Gallery hours: Tue - Sat, 11 AM - 5 PM and by appointment

802 Northwest 22nd street, Miami, FL, USA

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