Mari Carmen Orizondo is a Cuban-born, Dominican Republic-based photographer that has had an active artistic career during the last years in her adoptive country. ArtMedia Gallery has invited her to present in Miami the project Traverse, a photographic work re-conceived for this exhibition as a wall installation. She proposes here a metaphorical approach to clandestine maritime emigration based on a real story.

An international phenomenon with a high impact on Miami history and contemporaneity, migration has also been a relevant problem for Mari Carmen Orizondo's artistic exploration. She grew up outside her native country in an exiled family, knowing first-hand political migration reality. However, she has also been sensitive to other contemporary mass relocations, as current Venezuelan and North African people movements to other countries and even regions. Therefore, inside the broad spectrum of issues related to migration, Mari Carmen is interested mainly in the human experience in which personal events are involved in risks, griefs, desires, expectations, oblivions, memories, and many more feelings.

Several specific characteristics distinguish the creative strategies applied by the artist in Traverse. First, she constructs more a poetic, allusive narrative than a detailed one because she prefers to connect the specific, individual facts—in sum, the personal story— to the uncertain encounter with the now and the future that is intrinsic to the journey of migration. Second, consequently to the precedent, the conception of Traverse concedes more importance to emotions than descriptions: the artist privileges to stimulate in the spectator a state of mind and mood rather than to recreate a possible trip's sequence. Besides, Mari Carmen systematically uses the extreme close-up as a visual resource to submerge the spectator into her narrative. She slowly stops her camera very close to objects —those remaining as the testimonies of the migrant's runaway— and juxtaposes them to details of the sea. The outcome of these strategies is an exhibition space where drama, vulnerability, strength, individual, and history converge.

About the artist

Mari Carmen Orizondo is a Cuban-born and Dominican Republic-based photographer. She has frequently exhibited in the most important institutions and art spaces of her adoptive country. In the US, her work was part of the exhibition …Of the Americas. Contemporary Latin American Art from the LUAG Teaching Collection, presented at Lower Gallery, Zoellner Arts Center, Lehigh University, Pennsylvania, from 2015 to 2018. Traverse is her first solo show in the US.

About the curator

Cuban-born José Antonio Navarrete resided in Venezuela for two decades. He currently lives and works in Miami, Florida. He is a critic, researcher, and independent curator of art and visual culture, who recently began to practice art photography and video. His last published book was Escribiendo sobre fotografía en América Latina. Antología de textos 1925-1970, edited by Centro de Fotografía, Montevideo, in 2018. In 2020, the Cuban Legacy Gallery at Miami Dade College exhibited his curatorial project Remaking Miami. Josefina Tarafa’s Photographs of the 1970s.

About the gallery

Artmedia Gallery was founded in 2012. With a location in Little River, Miami, Florida, the gallery has the mission to exhibit and promote contemporary art based on photography and video practices. One of the gallery’s central objectives is to explore the vast possibilities of the expanded notion of art through media technology.

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