ADRIANA CORRAL: LINE AS HUMAN / LA LINEA COMO CONCEPTO HUMANO

For her first exhibition at the gallery, Line as human / La línea como concepto humano, Corral will present recent work. The exhibition title is originally derived from a written text/sabidura in the 1960’s by the artist Gego.

Adriana Corral’s installations, performances, and sculptures embody universal themes of loss, human rights violations, memory, and erased historical narratives.  Her practice is rigorous and researched based, often requiring her to work within the archives. Experts ranging from historians, librarians, anthropologists, writers, journalists, gender scholars, human rights attorneys, and the victims’ families provide Corral with vital data that aids in the conception of her works.

“Born in El Paso, Texas in 1983, Corral’s artistic production stems from a profoundly research and archival-based practice. Working with ash and soil as her primary mediums, she deals with the concept of loss by using matter in its most basic form: the earth that we stand on and the burned remnants of what has been. She investigates the material circumstances of memory by using erasure not only as an aesthetic device but also as a method of production. Erasure can be understood as the forceful elimination or destruction of content by means of removal, often with the goal of leaving no trace left behind. It can manifest itself in many ways including censorship, effacement, exclusion, or rejection, and through acts such as the elimination of histories from textbooks, the toppling of monuments, the replacement of political structures, and the destruction of cultural artifacts. The main goal of erasure is to enact organized forgetting. Its violence becomes palpable not only for the communities that bear it, but also for those who inflict it onto others.” -Emily L. Butts, Assistant Director, Lawndale Art Center

Excerpt above taken from “Ephemerality, Permanence, and the Circulation of Cultural Memory.” Full text forthcoming in Vistas: Critical Approaches to Modern and Contemporary Latin American Art published by the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.