Juan Erman Gonzalez

Juan Erman Gonzalez

I reflect on “el camino.” The metaphorical and actual path I have traveled since first working with DVCAI in 2002, to celebrate it. Working with a background in Fiber Arts and couture, my visual art practice mines abilities of sewing, pattern-making and drawing and my inherent practice’s need to construct, reconstruct and again, utilizing materials as gifts, honoring them in thematic concentrations. As an exile, I address migration, uprootedness and displacement,

using manipulation of repurposed, post-production recycled goods to create complex, sometimes naive narratives of imagined worlds and their inhabitants, inviting the viewer to meet the storied characters in places where heirlooms, generational deitrius and memories gather. EL Camino (o parte de el) 2019, is such a visualscape. A place resurrected from other places, rearranged, recontextualized roads of family, homelands, love and hope. Likewise, Los Que (no) LLegaron, 2016, is an installation that references migration and that phenomenom of often perilous proportions that even when successful, questions its results and circularity. The “terrain,” is fabricated utilizing green garments recycled from a FB call for donations and as such, full of spiritual essence from the wearers/donors, mostly immigrants with hyphenated American experiences.