97th ANNUAL Solo Exhibitions

January 20 — March 25, 2023

The Print Center is pleased to present exhibitions of recent work by Cheryl Mukherji, María Verónica San Martín and Idalia Vasquez-Achury.

These three artists were selected from ten Finalists named from the over 400 applicants to the 97th ANNUAL International Competition. The esteemed jurors were Dr. Makeda Best and Curlee Raven Holton. The exhibitions were organized by independent curator Liz K. Sheehan and Executive Director Elizabeth Spungen.

Many commonalities emerged among the winners of this year’s solo shows. Cheryl Mukherji, María Verónica San Martín and Idalia Vasquez-Achury are all women born outside the United States who came here to further their artistic education and remained to pursue their careers. Beyond that shared circumstance, viewers will discover threads that relate to the artists’ varied identities as mothers, daughters and immigrants; the lasting effects of political and familial trauma; the meaning and weight of inheritance; the intersections of performance and photography; and the complicated relationship between truth and memory.

– Liz K. Sheehan, Independent Curator

Programs

All of The Print Center’s exhibitions and programs are free and open to the public.

Cheryl Mukherji: Ghorer Bairer Aalo (The Light Outside Home)

The events surrounding Cheryl Mukherji’s move from India to the United States in 2018, and the separation from her family since then, are the main subjects of her series “Ghorer Bairer Aalo” (The Light Outside Home). In layered and complex images, Mukherji confronts the painful moments typically omitted from family albums to create a counter-archive that examines her relationship with her mother in the context of cultural and familial tradition, likeness and inheritance.

Mukherji uses her family photographs as source material to play with connection and separation through revealing contrasts and similarities between her life and her mother’s. In her words, her work is “an exploration of my origin and inheritance embedded in the figure of my mother. It deals with memory, mental illness, transgenerational trauma, personal and collective South Asian histories, and how they inform my identity as an immigrant in the United States…. In my work, I recall when my mother self-harmed in front of me on my last day at home before moving to New York. Through an uncanny juxtaposition of photographs from my mother’s life and my own personal writing, my work brings forth the complications of a mother-daughter relationship, meditating on domestic labor – not as in washing dishes, but in the work it takes to stay related to someone, even your own mother.”

María Verónica San Martín: Geology of Memory / Geología de la Memoria

María Verónica San Martín engages with the complicated political history of her native Chile through printmaking, installation and performance, with handmade artist books at the center of her practice. She believes that art has a civic, historic and political responsibility to reconstruct the stories of the past in order to create social change. Acknowledging the form of the book as a repository of both memory and knowledge, her work challenges systems of power while proposing a way to learn and heal in the context of past trauma.

Many of San Martín’s books contain text and images derived from government and press archives that expose the human rights violations committed during the 1973-1990 regime of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Her ongoing series “Moving Memorials,” begun in 2012, consists of thirteen editioned books printed and bound by the artist to honor the tens of thousands of murdered citizens and the thousands still missing. San Martín describes cutting woodblocks as “carving into history,” and observes that while making an etching, “an image that disappears in the printmaking process then reappears printed on paper, like the search for truth and reparation.” She activates her books and engages audiences through performances that transform the intimate act of reading into a public conversation rooted in visual poetry, using choreography that positions reading as a physical act of protest and remembrance. 

The relationship between the body, the work and the landscape is an important element of San Martín’s practice. For this exhibition, she designed a labyrinthine table to display her books in a sculptural topography that surrounds the viewer. The title Geology of Memory can refer to this immersive installation; to the Chilean landscape in which so many citizens are buried or lost; or to the layers of history and rhetoric that threaten the truth. 

Idalia Vasquez-Achury: Mind of Winter

Idalia Vasquez-Achury has titled her exhibition the Mind of Winter after the essay “Reflections on Exile” by the postcolonial theorist Edward Said, in which he considers how immigrant artists might use the feeling of dislocation to their advantage. Said proposes that the lived experience of more than one culture creates a plurality of vision and a clarity of perspective that he terms a “mind of winter,” quoting poet Wallace Stevens. Using both digital and film cameras, Vasquez-Achury blends fact and fiction in her work with a mix of street and documentary photography, performance and installation, creating metaphors for the complex experiences of immigrants and mothers.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the handmade book, Marisma, the Spanish word for estuary – a turbulent and transitional marine environment that nevertheless supports some of the most diverse and productive ecosystems in the world. For Vasquez-Achury, this ecological metaphor helps to convey her experience as a Colombian-born woman, mother and artist living in Philadelphia. She describes this project as existing in the liminal spaces between cultures and nationalities, and between physical locations and imagined or represented spaces, where she has built a sense of place, home and identity.