Génesis Báez es un artista de Brooklyn que trabaja con la fotografía y el video. Nacido en Massachusetts, Báez creció tanto en los EE.UU. como en Puerto Rico. Tiene un MFA de la Universidad de Yale, donde fue galardonada con el Premio John Ferguson Weir a la Excelencia (2019) y el Premio a la Práctica Crítica (2018). Es ex-alumna de la Escuela de Pintura y Escultura de Skowhegan (2019) y posee una licenciatura en fotografía con honores del Colegio de Arte y Diseño de Massachusetts. Báez ha expuesto recientemente con Yancey Richardson en Nueva York, Living Arts of Tulsa en Oklahoma, Diagonal en Puerto Rico y Chart Gallery, Nueva York.
Trabajando con fotografía y video, Génesis Báez explora cómo la gente se relaciona con el lugar, la historia y la imaginación en el contexto de la vida en la diáspora. Centrándose en las vidas y entornos de las mujeres en Puerto Rico y su diáspora en los EE.UU., Báez traza las formas en que el lugar y la pertenencia pueden existir en movimiento. Al centrarse en elementos efímeros y mutables, como el agua, el sonido, el aire, la luz y la sombra, sus imágenes consideran las formas en que la ausencia es un espacio que no siempre está vacío, y cómo la vida puede moverse dentro y fuera de él. Para The Backroom, Genesis reúne diferentes imágenes y textos que establecen una relación emotiva con la visibilidad, la transitoriedad, el anhelo y las inestables reivindicaciones de la fotografía para la preservación de la memoria.
Digitized 35 mm film
Duration: 01:15:00:04
Image source: https://pulitzerarts.org/feature/derek-jarman-blue/
Image Credit: NASA/NOAA, Colin Seftor
The film traces the fine line between worlds, the spaces where the living and the dead coexist. It has been pivotal in inspiring my thinking around presence, absence, and fluidity through space and time.
An excerpt from a text I wrote called Most of My Body I Cannot See:
“In every studio I have set up for myself in the last three years, I lay out my Water Objects. Sometimes on velvet, sometimes on the ground. I organize them by color or shape, I move them, I play. On my trips to Puerto Rico, I began collecting my Water Objects, things that remind me of the colors I see in the Caribbean sea. They are objects which were at one time buried in the earth, but later were churned up by weather or washed up by the sea. A tiny glass bottle for makeup foundation, a braid of acrylic rope, a Reggaeton Hits 2002 CD, shards of Jadeite, chunks of house. They live quietly in my studio, absorbing my skin cells and voice.”
Flower Person (Flower Body), 1975
Super 8 film still.
Description: flower body flowing down a body of water.
Gloria Anzaldua, La Herencia de Coatlicue
bell hooks, In Our Glory
Rebecca Solnit, The Blue of Distance
[1] En algunos materiales el título de la exhibición es descrito como “Acto de presencia en México.”
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Hellen Ascoli writes—about weaving and translation—"To let my body be the place where tension meets the ground," and I imagine a lightning rod connecting languages, pulling threads. She combs, she rakes, she draws an exhibition with neon tapes across her backyard, she stacks two tree limbs in an embrace. I spend my pandemic mornings in the sand of a barren yard in the Great Plains in isolation, and the grit powders my skin and gets into my teeth. We write each other letters. Manal Abu-Shaheen sends me a cyanotype she makes, of the ship that brought her great-grandfather to Ellis Island in 1907. She sends a photograph of the sun dunking into the sea beside Beirut. We talk about the failure of language to account for the distance between here and there, especially in these anguished weeks since the explosion. Her photographs of that city were already moving indoors, but now, isolating in New York, she imagines the intimacy of photographing her friends in their homes, indoors, together. The imagining is about closeness, about touch, about longing and what is no longer here, about having a coffee and telling the stories of this particular year. Thuy-Van Vu describes how her father would plant patches of green, plants and flowers, in the sun-bleached yard of his home in Phoenix, Arizona, and how they would always die under the summer sun there. We talk about things that couldn’t be said in words. “This is the idea of a house my father built,” writes poet Diana Khoi Nguyen. Plants now cover every surface of her Seattle office and home; she feels guilty for letting one of them expire for a painting. She sends photographs from a trip to Vietnam: modest sandals in a glass case at the Museum of Fine Arts in Ho Chi Minh City are marked with dirt from an artist’s day of work. A boy sands a carved Buddha, and the wood gradually changes tones. A typed list of “useful phrases for emergencies” in Vietnamese includes “Don’t shoot!” Photographs of a helicopter made of woven grasses and a broken wooden sculpture of a tank are local thrift store finds, imported from Vietnam.
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