Issue 156
Guest Curator: Claudia Ruiz Gustafson
For this edition of Fraction Magazine, I have the pleasure to introduce to you a group of four eclectic and “under the radar” Latin American and Latinx visual artists. I find their work fresh, compelling, original and important.
Carol Espindola is a Mexican artist who courageously turns the camera around to capture her own body, as a way of protest and storytelling and also as an exercise in reclaiming her own body in a country where women’s bodies are still battlegrounds. I love the way she combines archival book pages with contemporary imagery, I feel she’s correcting history and securing a space for her and for all the women who for ages have been removed from the canon and relegated as second-class citizens.
Flor Ruiz is a Peruvian photographer who has been documenting the people and the landscape of Peru for many years. For this edition she is sharing her work Passengers in which she captures the intricate and beautiful artwork of trucks. This project uncovered an interesting and unknown network of artists who specialize in this beautiful art as well as the syncretic iconography which is meant to work as an amulet to protect the driver and the passengers of these trucks who circulate around the diverse routes of Peru.
Vivian Poey’s soft and poetic work covers themes of family, border and immigration. In the current project, Pedacito de Mar, I am intrigued by her little windows in which we can always see the ocean. This gesture makes me want to stay more with her pieces, which also remind me of my own family images. I love the idea of including her own research in her work, Vivian does this in the second art of Pedacito de Mar, by cutting and, pasting both images and text. Her work asks the hard questions and encourages the audience to be part of the conversation about human rights, immigration and truth in politics.
Diego De La Vega is a young Peruvian photographer who uses the camera to capture the interior landscapes of the soul. For this edition, I curated and combined images from two series: his self-portrait series and his pandemic series titled Foreign Days, in which he photographs without a pre-conceived idea, following the light and his state of mind during the strict Peruvian lock-down of 2020 and 2021. The images are like dream works; they seem to whisper us that something is wrong, they ask us to connect with them in a visceral way.
April 2022
Claudia Ruiz Gustafson (she, ella) is a Peruvian Latinx visual artist based in Framingham, Massachusetts, United States.
www.claudiafineart.com | @claudiaruizgustafson
Dias Ajenos/Foreign Days by Diego De La Vega
De cuando habitamos el cuerpo/From when we inhabit the body by Carol Espíndola
Un pedacito de mar/A little piece of the sea by Vivian Poey
Pasajeros/Passengers by Flor Ruiz
