La Sirena (The Mermaid)
Ernesto Cabral de Luna

44" x 22" Inkjet print of image transferred onto corroded copper plate
$1000.00

Inspired by 20th century Mexican Exvotos (retablos), votive paintings made on sheets of tin serving as a form of gratitude to a religious figure, this series is a study of memory, immigration and exile – focusing on how personal archives facilitate the construction and struggle to retain an individual and cultural identity.

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Alberto Manguel speaks on how the artist in exile’s "faithful memory will betray his country’s present reality - the exile sees the country as it never is... everything he does is colored by something half remembered... it is a country drawn from memory, from things half known or half dreamt, and the exiled doesn't ask too earnestly if there really is a difference.” Reinterpreting and appropriating my parents’ photographs of them growing up in Mexico by transferring them onto a corroded copper plate allows me to work through my relationship to absence, nostalgia, and the faulty functions of memory.