#FOTOSEPTIEMBRE 2022 Exhibition Documentation #AnayanztinContreras Todo Bajo El Cielo #UniversityOfTheIncarnateWord #SanAntonioTX

ANAYANTZIN CONTRERAS (Monterrey, Mexico)
Todo Bajo El Cielo
Curated by Gabriella Boschi Scott
University Of The Incarnate Word
Semmes and Condos Galleries
4301 Broadway Street, San Antonio, TX 78209
https://www.uiw.edu/chass/academics/departments/art/semmesgallery.html

Born in Mexico City and currently residing in Monterrey, Mexico, Miss Contreras studied Photography in the Brigham Young University (Utah) program and Architecture at UdeM (Universidad de Monterrey) and works as a professional architect. Her photographic works have been featured in individual and collective exhibitions and are in private collections in Mexico and abroad.

The work of Mexican photographers Anayantzin Contreras and José Luis Rodriguez Ritte explores the tensions embodied by their country’s syncretic heritage: tensions between nature and culture, instinct and intellect, design and improvisation, the local and the global, history and contemporaneity.

These works, created in Mexico and abroad, are informed by cross-cultural exchange but also deeply grounded in the history of Mexican visual culture, in which figuration and abstraction have alternated through centuries to deploy, respectively, spirituality and intellectualism. Some of the images are presented as traditional 2-D works, some others are seeking status as objects: through the use of tactile, non-traditional materials and arrangements they evoke presence and encounter, juxtaposing tradition and modernity.

In Contreras’ work, landscape becomes introspective, disembodied and ethereal, while natural forms are abstracted into line, texture and arcane geometry; Rodriguez Ritte explores idiosyncratic beauty without indulging in the narrow optics of the ethnographic gaze: the portrait is a convergence of personal and social truths, while architecture lays bare contradiction and paradox, but also imagination. Both artists focus on revealing the complexity and sophistication that, combined with a contemporary sensibility, reveal the adaptive, receptive nature of a culture in a constant state of renewal. Ojos que no ven, corazón que no siente.

•••

•••

•••