SCULPTURE ARCHIVE.
Sculpture uses physicality to speak to subject matter. Sculpture is unique in its ability to attend to abstraction as much as it can literal representation, and speak on subjects of human rights with varying degrees of opacity. Although sculpture can take public form, and does in the case of many artists, the examples illustrated below will focus on sculpture embedded in a fine arts realm, the realm of the gallery. Here, sculpture speaks to and educates a specific audience, one of relative privilege.
COLOMBIA.
Doris Salcedo is a sculptor and visual artist from Colombia. She works with Joseph Beuys' notion of "social sculpture" through which social analysis and education is embedded in the process of artistic production. Doris' work, Unland speaks on the physicality of violence on the lives of children- specifically, orphaned children she had interviewed, who had witnessed the death of their parents. Doris uses home furniture and personal effects of the children- hair, clothing, to bring together the experience of a reconstructed home and past trauma. Unland is a work that can be viewed as something beautiful at a distance, yet- upon closer analysis. It brings intense violence at the table for discussion.
EL SALVADOR.
My Veins Do Not End In Me is a intergenerational collaborative piece, led by Juan Edgar Aparicio, an architect and artist from El Salvador, based in LA, his mother, and his son. The work includes a variety of mediums, surrounding a central constellation of sculptures. The work seeks to contextualize the current refugee crisis at the US-Mexico border, in the historically US-backed war in El Salvador. The piece calls upon imagery of forced migration due to violence, and the effects of generational trauma. This contextualization is specifically poignant in its familial closeness, but also in shedding light on a significant piece of historical context, that is rarely (if ever) addressed in media.
