Rozenman + Valdez: When a Pandemic Strikes the Road Unfolds
This February the main gallery features core artist Alexandra Rozenman and guest artist Nora Valdez. Their exhibition Unfolding Roads runs through February 28th with a virtual artist talk on Sunday, February 21st at 3:00PM. Please RSVP for the talk here. Gallery hours are Saturday + Sunday from 12–4PM and Monday–Friday by appointment. Below the artists talk a bit about their experience making and showing work in the time of COVID.
Alexandra Rozenman
My show with Nora Valdez was originally scheduled for the April 2020 and was called “Outlanders.” It was rescheduled because of COVID-19 and we eventually changed its name because so much had happened–in our lives and in our work. This show is one of the most flexible shows I have ever experienced in my life.
On March 12, 2020, I left Boston for rural Virginia thinking that I would spend a few weeks with my parents, avoid COVID-19, and help them manage. I did not realize how long this would last. In a few weeks all my teaching fell into pieces either transforming into an online setting or vanishing completely. I ended up staying in Virginia.
The Collage Project started with quarantine. After the unexpected move out of my studio space and to Virginia, I started working on smaller pieces of paper adding ink and watercolor to my older drawings that I found around the house. Everything felt disconnected. My thoughts began separating. First older images became shapes inside the watercolor paintings, and then I began combining watercolors and drawings, watercolors with watercolors, and drawings with drawings. I was choosing sections and making shapes out of old ideas, always looking, selecting and choosing. Dissecting and connecting pieces of my older work gave me a “big room” to hold new ideas.
I was fully immersed inside the process. Everything I was creating in the moment made themselves, because I was giving them everything they needed, in exactly the right way, and at exactly the right time. My thoughts materialized into shapes, shapes into images, and images into untold stories. I now know that this is an on-going project.
I love the revised title of our show, “Unfolding Roads.” It really feels right with all this new work.
Nora Valdez
The road that has brought me here this year is the strangest one of all. All masked up, distancing without hugs or kisses, and working in silence, I developed this show reacting to the winds and taking on the curves in the road. We had to keep rescheduling, which overtime changed the work. Adding, subtracting, and following the road that never ends––like this pandemic and 2020!
Even with all the obstacles we encountered, we learned to recreate and keep looking inside ourselves. We kept working, and expressing our deepest feelings and beliefs. On this unfolding road, I mixed some older work with new; in some pieces I kept working and they kept changing through the journey.
Ideas of transition, moving and immigration, as well as the uncertain feeling and burden carried within these ideas are all present in this body of work. I added some drawings and some boxes that have traveled with me through different states and countries. They became the frames for some small stone pieces.
The idea of a container, a box, is like a place to be, like a warm blanket that covers me. That place where we are at peace. Some work I made while thinking of leaving behind home and/or making home anywhere. The act is not hard; stand up and walk out the door.
I walk with many thoughts; my mind builds a house and fills that house with all my thoughts. I create my own village. My own universe. I keep walking on this great unfolding road.