Art Heals: Social Practice
Amy Bravo, Jarvis Boyland, and Priscilla Aleman
Joining us in July 2022, Amy, Jarvis, and Prisciila are part of Fountainhead Residency's inaugural Art Heals: Social Practice residency, reserved for artists whose work involves people and cultures at its heart. This residency is generously sponsored by Britta Jacobson and Philip Berlinski.
Amy Bravo
Though Amy Bravo has never visited the rural town in Cuba her grandparents left in the 1940s, visions of its lands loom large in her work. Inspired the memories, histories, and experiences she always heard about and only dreamed of visiting herself, Amy’s multimedia works are mythical, imaginative journeys across the island. Grounded in this personal narrative, Amy draws figures into fictional Cuban landscapes, in a manner that’s ‘between both here and there,’ as she describes it. Through the work, Amy attempts to bring her grandparents and their stories back to life, while seating her idealization of their relationship into the reality of family conflict. Themes around queerness, acceptance, and identity are at the heart of her drawings, paintings, and sculptural worlds. Figures like horses, roosters and birds intersect with self-portraits rendered in different forms - from bold and courageous, to shy and demure.
Amy’s process begins with a daydream; she’ll begin drawing onto her canvas without any prior sketches. Though she used to draw from photographs, over time she realized she was simply creating ‘different versions’ of herself, and now draws her figures more intuitively. Once her figures are complete, Amy begins her sculptural assemblage practice, which involves sourcing found objects from her curiosity cabinet. This practice is deeply rooted in her Latinx and familial heritage, which glorifies trinkets and their display. Her completed works are immersive paintings with sculptural elements, bringing the viewer into her inner world. Amy has recently exhibited at Rachel Uffner (New York), Herrero de Tejada (Spain) and New York University; her work has been featured in New American Paintings, Hyperallergic and New York Magazine. Amy lives and works in New York.
Jarvis Boyland
Jarvis Boyland’s work contemplates the past to help us question how we romanticize it. His figurative paintings and drawings conjure retro environments that evoke the 1970s. Through his idyllic color palette and delicate rendering of textiles and flesh, Boyland offers moments of personal reconciliation that traverse time.
Over the years, Boyland has negotiated aspects of his Southern religious upbringing through aspirational images of Black relationships. His sensitively rendered portraits of people from his community, often situated in fictitious domestic environments, consider gender and intimacy. Boyland’s work has been collected by numerous private and public collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and the Brooklyn Museum. Boyland lives and works in Los Angeles.
Priscilla Aleman
With a background in archaeology, Priscilla Aleman’s practice retraces ideas around the afterlife, Pre-Columbian cosmology, and the interplay of cultures from the global south. Her Miami upbringing guides her work of understanding of the landscape’s past traditions and its global history. She brings to life her own parallel and intersecting universes spiritually in process and form. Citing the ocean as a connective tissue Priscilla brings together materials collected from related regions throughout the Americas and Caribbean. She incorporates a multitude of deep field research and work to push the process of re-contextualizing old and new worlds. The arrangement of materials in her sculptural installations lends itself to be either collector, creator, analyst, believer, or practitioner. These sculptures, akin to offerings or altars, allow Priscilla to chart the waves and ways we are interconnected. Priscilla is inspired by powerful spiritual beings, their variations in written and oral histories and how they shape our understanding of ecological and energetic fields. She equates the practice of thoughtful assemblage with care and ritual, connecting the physical and sacred realms.
At the core of her work is the preservation of memory. Utilizing materials that have shaped human culture, she inspires a sense of wonder and reminds us of the sacred cycle of life and death by creating body casts. For Priscilla, the mother molds (a term used in sculpture that she poetically plays with) remind her of ‘my body’s own generative power to recreate.’ Casting - an intimate experience between herself and her subjects (her friends and family members) - becomes part of many of her works. Field research drives Priscilla’s process, and can encompass anything from field excavations with local archaeologists to free-form time spent in the ocean, in her backyard, or in botanical centers around the world. During these moments in the field, Priscilla intuitively collects relics- seeds, fruits, rocks, shells, materials that enact memories- while observing and registering her own spiritual experience. Back in the studio, she archives her findings neatly into groupings while considering how they might make their way into new works.
As part of her wayfinding, in her newest series of works she uses cut-outs of National Geographic magazines as the backdrop for assemblage works. These series of collages are meditations using her collection of vintage National Geographic magazines. Priscilla excavates into the magazines by cutting, folding, tearing, relaying and encasing the pages in resin. She highlights and conceals content with color, tropical plant materials from around the world, fragments of architecture, textiles, and personal relics. The collages are meditations into color, contentious history, and exchanges between worlds, like dreamscapes. In these dreamscapes she allows for meaning to emerge and re-contextualize. In dreams we can navigate and create space for new meaning, allowing us to bring new insight and inspiration into the waking world. Priscilla has recently shown new work with the Wavehill Project Space and YoungArts, who previously named Priscilla a Presidential Scholar in the Arts; she was recently commissioned for a public work by the New York Botanical Garden. Prisciila lives and works in New York.
