“Vacation spot/El Destino: a decade of GRAFT,” by Puerto Rican artist Edra Soto, is an upcoming exhibition opening at Chicago’s Hyde Park Artwork Middle (Gallery 1 & Jackman Goldwasser Catwalk Gallery). The exhibition runs from April 22 to August 6, 2023.
Description: The solo exhibition Vacation spot/El Destino: a decade of GRAFT concentrates on the decade-long collection of artworks by Chicago-based, Puerto Rican artist, educator, and organizer Edra Soto, whereas speculating on the evolution of this work in direction of establishing extra emotionally transformative and therapeutic public areas. Activating the indoor/outside characteristic of the principle gallery, Soto will construct an immersive set up of porous sculptures, documentary pictures, drawings and video games that create a playful and open setting for discussing cultural hybridity.
By means of the GRAFT collection of sculptures, wall reliefs and installations, Edra Soto explores vernacular structure acquainted to the artist’s native Puerto Rico to handle the adaptability and hybridity of cultural illustration. GRAFT makes reference to 2 frequent home architectural components: the quiebrasoles, that are distinctly ornate concrete blocks, and rejas, decorative grilles or screens usually made from wrought iron. Each are organized in ornamental geometric patterns to create shade or act as a protecting barrier between the road and the house. Latest iterations of GRAFT embody small viewfinders embedded within the void of geometric patterns in Soto’s installations. In peering by means of the viewfinders, the viewers is met with photos of Soto’s childhood dwelling, scenes from numerous neighborhoods, destruction from hurricane Maria, screenshots of tv commercials, and journal ads. In earlier GRAFT work, all photograph documentation has come from Soto’s private archive. For Vacation spot/El Destino, Soto will collaborate with Puerto Rican and US-based artists to incorporate their pictures and broaden the voices and visions represented within the structure.
Edra Soto is a Puerto-Rican born artist, curator, educator, and co-director of the outside undertaking area, The Franklin. Soto instigates significant, related, and infrequently tough conversations surrounding socioeconomic and cultural oppression, erasure of historical past, and lack of cultural information. Rising up in Puerto Rico, and now immersed in her Chicago group, Soto’s work has advanced to lift questions on constructed social orders, diasporic id, and the legacy of colonialism. Soto has exhibited extensively at venues together with El Museo del Barrio (NY), the Museum of Up to date Artwork of Chicago (IL), ICA San Diego, (CA) and the Whitney Museum of American Artwork (NY). She has been awarded the Efroymson Up to date Arts Fellowship, the Illinois Arts Council Company Fellowship, the inaugural Foundwork Artist Prize, the Joan Mitchell Basis Painters & Sculptors Grant and the Bemis Middle’s Ree Kaneko Award amongst others. Soto exhibited and traveled to Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Cuba as a part of the MacArthur Basis’s Worldwide Connections Fund. Soto holds an MFA from the Faculty of the Artwork Institute of Chicago and a bachelor’s diploma from Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico. The artist lives and works in Chicago.
For extra data, see https://www.hydeparkart.org/exhibition-archive/edra-soto-destination-el-destino-a-decade-of-graft/
[Photo above by EUGENE TANG: Installation view of “Edra Soto: Destination / El Destino, A decade of Graft,” 2023, at Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago.]