Curated and featuring works by Flora Artist-in-Residence Geovanni Barrios, with special guests Veronica Bello and Cici Osias.
Taking inspiration from NASA’s Hubble Deep Field—a series of images revealing thousands of distant galaxies and offering new perspectives on the formation and scale of the universe—ARCO PROFUNDO considers how human-scale history might be measured. The culmination of Geovanni Barrios’ residency at Flora, this group exhibition brings together three artists whose practices explore and seek to remedy personal and inherited disconnections from place and family.
Barrios considers how advances in geospatial technologies have transformed and, in many ways, diminished our human-scale relationship with the planet. Through his latest works on paper and wood, Barrios reflects on his own disconnection from nature. Inspired by his family's Maya roots in Guatemala and his personal experiences in the Everglades, Barrios employs billowing, abstract forms on paper to make sense of his place within the larger 'American' landscape.
Through woven works by Bello, this inquiry extends into the ways family narratives unfold across the expanse of the planet. Bello's calado technique—unweaving and reweaving—from her family's home in the Canary Islands, shows us how relationships with loved ones can be sustained across geographic, cultural, and generational distances. Her works attempt to shorten the distances between her family across Spain, Venezuela, and the United States.
Osias turns the exhibition’s expansive questions back toward the intimate and familiar. Rooted in traditional Congolese dye techniques, Osias’ latest works use cassava-root resists and natural dyes, drawing materials and processes from the world around us. Employing traditional West African and diasporic iconographies, her participatory practice further emphasizes the importance of making as a communal act, reminding us that our relationship to place is also built through the people with whom we share it.
The exhibition draws from the range of lived experience between the three artists to present a new vision of an increasingly globalized world and the ways in which we document our relationship with our planet and to eachother.