Curators: Omar Lopez-Chadoud and CJ Chueca
Opening Reception: Friday, June 9th, 2023, 6:00-10:00 pm
Exhibition Dates: June 10th – August 20th, 2023
Location: Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling,
898 St Nicholas Ave, New York, NY 10032
Hours: Saturdays and Sundays 10:00-3:00 pm, Thursdays 5:30-8:00 pm

NEW YORK –Mental Spaces I brings together eleven artists from Latin America that reside in New York City. The works exhibited present a scenario in which the viewer is seduced to engage with the art in a non-objective way. The curators have chosen the participating artists based on their multiple cross-cultural references in which the poetics of the absurd are at times embraced. This exhibition plays on the complex relationships that exist between the artist’s mind and its most intuitive form of visual expression, often manifested through some form of abstraction. Its multimedia, process-driven works allow for a dynamic stage in which multiple concepts collide to present the most essential elements, that of being human.

Through research, the curators found that “Mental Spaces” refers to the concept of cognitive structures that are used by people to represent and organize information in their minds. They are thought of as mental containers that hold information related to a particular topic, situation, or context, and can be accessed and manipulated as needed. They allow people to make inferences, draw conclusions, and create new meanings based on their experiences and knowledge. Overall, the theory of mental spaces provides a valuable framework for understanding how people organize and make sense of the world around them, and how language and thought are intertwined in complex and dynamic ways.

Alejandra Seeber (Argentina) is working on a series of rug paintings that draw inspiration from her research with an activist movement of resistance during the last years of the Argentine dictatorship known as “el siluetazo” or the silhouettes. A simple yet effective way to conjure the body, as a ghost, traced or whole, demanding accountability towards the government. It carries the burden of death, grief, and remembrance, now the artist appropriates these gestures and depicts the bodies boldly in her work. Working through her relationship to depicting bodies and their collective traumas,  the use of the rug serves as a conduit to the body as a metaphor to the notions of rest, arrival, and home, while the artist explores the familiar whilst the uncomfortable feelings and memories it surfaces.