Sula Bermúdez-Silverman: Neither Fish, Flesh, nor Fowl
600 State Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90037
Friday, February 28 at 10:00 AM 5:00 PM
Ends Mar 28, 2020
Los Angeles-based artist Sula Bermúdez-Silverman investigates and critiques social structures through a conceptual and multidisciplinary practice that examines economic, racial, religious, and gendered systems of power. In her first solo museum exhibition in Los Angeles, the artist unites several bodies of work created since 2014, including a new series of sculptures made exclusively for CAAM. Bermúdez-Silverman mines her personal and familial histories as a woman of Afro-Puerto Rican and Jewish descent, transforming genetic data into colorful pie charts that call to mind hard-edged abstractions. Elsewhere, she embroiders vintage doilies with her own hair to depict the human body, as well as language that references the legacy of colorism and passing in the African diaspora. In another series, she creates quilts of clear plastic grids filled with found trash fragments from neighborhoods where she has lived, which function as markers of specific times and geographical locations. In the works debuting at CAAM, Bermúdez-Silverman addresses early global trade, the beginnings of commodification, and economic hierarchies by taking molds of her childhood dollhouse and creating casts of it in sugar, a material whose history has dictated that of her ancestors. Sula Bermúdez-Silverman: Neither Fish, Flesh, nor Fowl is curated by Mar Hollingsworth, Visual Arts Curator and Program Manager, CAAM, and presented in conjunction with afroLAtinidad: mi casa, my city, curated by Mariah Berlanga-Shevchuk and Walter Thompson-Hernández at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes.
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