Artmedia Gallery is participating at DIAF with the works of two artists who have been part of the gallery’s exhibition program for several years: Claudia Ammirata and Magüi Trujillo. 

In her body of work Sense of Impermanence, Claudia Ammirata focuses on small details and incidents that allude to the transience and fugacity of human existence. In a way, this series is also about how we relate to our emotions and feelings. Or, saying the same, how we situate them in our search for a place in a world in constant flux. 

Ammirata has wanted to clarify, with her work strategies, that she approaches these issues from the place of photography as representation, without mediating the verbalized word −except for those that base their enunciation on artistic arguments. Nevertheless, in her case, it is a representation of undoubtedly poetic inclination that, more than a record of things, seems to be frequently the trace that results from a slight contact with them. Her camera mostly does not like to rest on the photographed motif: it prefers to brush it.  

For her part, Magüi Trujillo, in The Breath of the Wind, gathers photography & video. Each photographic work is composed of a specific combination of various photographs, so they have different sizes and formal structures like triptychs, diptychs, and other arrangements. Videos are also based on photos animated by the slow movement of a video camera.  

The artist continues her visual exploration of form, texture, and the matter of nature’s physical elements. Consequently, this series has the pictorial configuration of a landscape or, better, acquires its visual self-definition in the form of representation usually related by artists and beholders to the landscape art genre. However, the artist conceives her photographic and video work outside of time and geographical specifications. For her, nature is, rather than a reason for landscape, a space for her spiritual searching through visual means, the best place to find images able to reveal her deeper self. Nature is, accordingly, her container and the source of her interior self-portraits, understanding the latter phrase as the metaphoric expression the Romantics would have liked to hear.  

About the artists 

Claudia Ammirata (Venezuelan, lives and works between Miami and Caracas) started photographing at a young age while living in Paris, France. She took courses on photography at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, California. Her first solo exhibition, Fix Me, was presented at Artmedia Gallery, Miami, in 2019. Her second one, Sense of Impermanence, in 2021 at the same gallery. Ammirata’s work has been included in group shows and art fairs. She is the author of the book Ephemeral Beauty, which was edited in 2017.  

Magüi Trujillo lives and works in Paris. Her photography and video production have been included in group and solo exhibitions. Her series Silencio Plural was selected in 2002 as part of the National Library of France Collection. The Breath of the Wind was selected for  the book edition in the Book Machine event, Paris Photo 2015, France. Her video-art is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas. She has presented two solo exhibitions at Artmedia Gallery: The Breath of the Wind in 2019 and Weaving in Silence in 2022.  

About the curator 
José Antonio Navarrete (Cuban-Venezuelan, based in Miami) is a critic, researcher, and independent art and visual culture curator. He is in charge of the ArtMedia curatorial program and participates in several international projects as a curator or writer contributor.  

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