Travelers and Settlers

Black & White Gallery/Project Space is proud to present Travelers and Settlersby Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez.

Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez’s sprawling installation Travelers and Settlers is an exploration of identity, memory, and gender. It represents the third chapter of the multi-narrative visual novel the artist has been working on for some time about cultural memory, migration and the pursuit of the American dream. The installation consists of paintings, sculptures, objects and mixed media that together and in different voices weave a synchronicity of dialogues, passages, punctuations, silences about hybridity and cultural ownership. Formally, these images are anchored in Minimalism as a dominant ideological umbrella and allude to the Pattern and Decoration Movement as well as Spanish Colonial Painting. By including family heirlooms alongside carved wood boats and black mirror-like panels that hold pearled sconces, the artist creates an environment that is beautiful, engaging, and introspective. Born in Colombia, Friedemann-Sánchez has lived and worked in both Bogotá and New York and now resides between Brooklyn, NY and Lincoln, Nebraska. Her work creates narratives that describe lives of spiritual and physical transit and expresses the dichotomy of living in between cultures and languages.

Artist Statement
Anchored in feminism, my art is infused by American and Colombian cultural forms that are dominant or subordinate. My art is a bicultural and transcultural experience; it speaks of difference, of opposites. Having grown up in Colombia and having migrated to the US as an adult. I make art in two languages about the curious and intense experience of physically having migrated, yet having a piece of myself remaining rooted in Colombia. I create visual expressions of that syncretism that has taken place since the conquest of the Americas and that gets replicated in the migration experience.

I see my art as multi-layered: it is political as it is personal. It is intricately interrelated with my domestic and work responsibilities; and with the supporting and administration of family and career. My options of life are integrated ethically in my art as I reflect and challenge the roles that historically have been assigned to women, in terms not only in the division of labor but also in the division of artistic and intellectual spaces.

Process
The intensive labor in making each work is about slowness, feeling and thinking; it is about doing a work that honors manual labor and where the artist manages an economy of materials. Each mark is indelible. Not erasing – using enamel on a pristine industrial surface – is an important and deliberate act as an echo of the trajectory, the steps that one takes one by one in time and space. Poetically, the impossibility of erasing is a metaphor of the liminal threshold that connotes both existing in exile and voyaging into a transformation of ones cultural DNA, a chain reaction that is assumed through time in existential and spiritual terms.