January 10 – 25, 2020
aceart, Winnipeg | 2nd floor, 290 McDermot Avenue
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** Opening + Performances: Friday, Jan 10 at 7 PM
** Artist Talk + Performances: Saturday, Jan 18 at 2:30 PM
** Regular Gallery Hours: Tues to Sat, noon to 5 PM
Admission is free, and all are welcome
MUJER ARTISTA: A NON PLACE
Art gathers in spaces of commonalities. Accepted aesthetics reflect more inclusion within the dominant demographic class than they do universal truths or transcendence. Art that is deemed to be good or of its time is typically made by artists who – by gender, skin colour, culture, family religion, sexuality or language – reflect back onto society an image of how it sees and understands itself. Art, made by its accepted makers, is amplified like hyperreal selfies society takes, designed to send specific messages about inclusion, exclusion and hierarchies of belonging, ultimately reinforcing where power resides.
In this context, Mujer Artista is a revolutionary act in its straightforwardness: giving name, space and place to Latin women artists working on the prairies.
Throughout 2019, our group of ten artists whose origins trace back to Mexico, Peru, Chile and Argentina, worked with Vancouver actor/playwright/author Carmen Aguirre and Toronto curator Tamara Toledo, and met throughout the year to engage in discussions and development ideas rooted within our common cultural and historic meshing – as women, as Latin American, as artists, as diasporic. Puesto / Place is both a culmination of this work and a step on a continued journey forward.
Here, taking space not on the fringe of the mainstream, not as an outreach activity defined through the lens of the Institution, Mujer Artista is then a conscious act of non belonging – of naming the non place where we reside, staking it as territory and making it home.
/ Cecilia Araneda, for Mujer Artista
Continue reading the catalogue…
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Mujer Artista acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, MAWA: Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art and aceartinc.
Image credit: landing / Cecilia Araneda