Artist-in-Residence Project
This exhibition is the result of a year-long Artist’s Residency in Silver City, New Mexico, sponsored by the Town of Silver City and Western New Mexico University - WNMU.
During his year of residency (2019-2020), the artist João Galera researched and produced work about Memory and Desire, using the poem The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot, and the book Os Sertões, by Euclydes da Cunha, as a basis for his project. With all this in mind, João explores through his art the memory of the land and the people of Grant County. He has also worked with different groups of people in the county to create a Community Art Installation.
The work in this virtual exhibition presents a portion of a show that had been planned for May at the WNMU McCray Gallery of Contemporary Art. It has been postponed until we are able to determine a new date.
Aprils, Summers, Fires and Good-nights
"April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers."
These first lines of the poem The Waste Land are the guiding thread for this path through memory and desire. What did we do? What do we want? These questions are fundamental in this moment of suspended time that we are living in. When this project began, the world was different and now all the drawings gain another meaning: this is the fascination of art. The poem of T.S. Eliot is current again.
On the other hand, Euclydes da Cunha, with his book about a group of people that wanted to build another way of living in the deserts (sertões) of Brazil (so similar to the landscape of this part of New Mexico), was the inspiration for the structure of this project: The Land, The People and The Fight.
We invite you to walk though this path of memory and desire...
