Paola de la calle
Everything is Ruins In This House
On View: May 24, 2024 - July 21, 2024 I Front Gallery
Opening Reception: Friday, May 24, 2024 | 6 - 8 PM
Artist Talk: Saturday, May 25, 2024 | Starting at 2 PM
About the Exhibition
Pulling its title directly from "La Patria" ("The Motherland"), a poem by Colombian writer María Mercedes Carranza, Everything is Ruins In This House delves into the intricate connection between power and memory.
Building upon the thematic foundations of her debut solo exhibition, ‘In This House We Are Buried Alive,’ De La Calle continues her exploration of collective memory and historical amnesia, this time delving deeper into the socio-political landscapes of two countries she considers home: the United States and Colombia. These countries serve not only as geographic anchors but also as fertile ground to explore how their intertwined histories shape personal family narratives, influence identity, and transform the cultural memory of an entire nation.
In this iteration, De la Calle introduces new works that delve into themes of food justice and el campo (the countryside) expanding the narrative to encompass broader social and historical contexts often excluded from historical archives.
Through a multidisciplinary approach spanning printmaking,ceramics, and textiles De la Calle explores the enduring legacy of the U.S. involvement in Colombia. At its core, the exhibition poses three questions: What becomes the memory of a culture? Of a family? Who benefits when memories are forgotten?
Everything is Ruins In This House invites us to confront the ghosts of history, to engage with archives and the intricacies of memory, and to contemplate the implications of forgetting.
About the Artist
Paola de la Calle is a Colombian-American multidisciplinary artist whose work examines home, identity, borders, and nostalgia through the use of textiles, printmaking, and sculpture. In her practice, De la Calle combines photographs sourced from family albums and found images which she prints on textiles, as well as poetic texts, paintings made with coffee instead of paint, and found objects, to mine the aesthetics of nostalgia and examine the socio-political relationship between the United States and Colombia. She is a graduate of the New York Foundation of the Arts Immigrant Artist Program in 2019 and the lead artist for the Caravan for the Children Campaign as part of her residency with Galeria de la Raza in 2020. She’s a 2022-2023 KALA Fellowship Award recipient and previously an Artist-in-Residence at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY. She’s been featured on Hyperallergic’s “A View from the Easel”, NPR, Refinery29, The Boston Art Review, Latina Magazine, and VOGUE among others.