Link Pin Art
Presents
PrintAustin Collective’s Invitational
Refusing Erasure
Woodcuts & Linocuts by Carlos Barberena
January 16 – February 9
Opening reception: January 18, 5-7.
East Side Third Thursday, January 16, Late Hours 6-8
“These portraits honor voices that continue to refuse erasure, who have never remained silent. The broad public hears us as the past and the other, static in their present futures: already buried, emigrated, displaced. We remain: we are our present and future.”
In his art, Carlos Barberena has consistently reflected on the myriad cycles of oppression and struggle. He departs from the cycle of diaspora in which he has lived, through dictatorship, revolution, renewal, hope, erasure, and repression. In his prints, he centers such life experiences occurring far beyond his country. At times he evokes them with satirical images, at others, through the mundane, unseen things people carry: memories, attachments, relationships and traumas.
Barberena creates to counteract the great silence in the face of repression occurring globally, believing we are all intimately connected to it. He seeks to demystify the “foreign” experience, to bridge the distances that life across any border or wall produces, but also, the difference in the content of these experiences. He creates to bring awareness to the interconnectedness among them, focusing on the struggle for social, political, economic and environmental justice.
Carlos Barberena (b. Granada, Nicaragua) is a contemporary printmaker known for his relief prints and the use of images from pop culture, as well as from political and cultural tragedies. Barberena lives and works in Chicago where he runs Bandolero Press. He is a core member of the Instituto Gráfico de Chicago.