Sub-Rural # 42, Patricia Villalobos Echeverría

The American Nicaraguan Patricia Villalobos Echeverría resides in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She  has a mature multi-disciplinary body of work based on matters of public media, gender perception, the elasticity of collective memory, migration, and the consequences of war. She has an extensive exhibition record, home and abroad, which illuminates the way subjective experience overlaps, transcends, and recuperates cultural authority. An ascendant modification of Nicaraguan identity, agendas of international economics, tactical scholasticism, and autobiography straddle a defiantly and paradoxically utopic way of picturing our increasingly transnational universe.

Her methods are influenced by an intersection of  investigative art and a narrative of intercultural arbitration, each influenced by post-structuralist philosophy, conceptual art, and a touch of Arte Povera and Nouveau realism. She’s absorbed a great deal of history about interactive and collaborative art practice that permits her to make formally articulate works in series with a profound exploration of installation, printmaking, photography, and video. Her most recent art addresses the material status of abstraction to real events, political agency, and civil unrest in Latin America, much that has faded in the view of Westerners but continues to reflect the totalizing rule of President Daniel Ortega.

Villalobos Echeverría investigates the paradoxical relationship between the hyper-documented and fragmented American plutocracy vs. the colonized, dissociative experiences of migratory Nicaraguans, whose identities and destinies have been determined by bare-knuckled U.S. foreign policies. The results of artists’ and others’ lives in overlapping, conflicting worlds that each territorialize media and wealth through militant partisanship, comes to surprisingly formal closure when Villalobos Echeverría unmasks the hostile and heroic on the border.

“Latitudes” and “Push < > Pull” are photo-based series that reference  the history of Nicaragua’s oppressive Somoza regime, as well as the current decades-long administration of Ortega and co-president and spouse Rosario Murillo, who maintain their own cycle of oppression. In 2018 the artist joined protesters in country-wide marches and photographed the events. She then organized the results into digital prints and produced formally vibrant and radically conceptual, video and sound installations.

A set of four-color lithographs titled “Latitudes” were the second in series produced from her documentation of the demonstrations. Blurred into subtle amorphous abstractions she dissects precarious fleeting moments of her experience. Each print has one vertical stripe that illustrates a crowd detail at various points in the otherwise abbreviated composition. Her intention was to provide an impression of suddenness and self-awareness that occurs during moments of high stress and alienation. The larger objective was to simulate the impression of betrayal and detachment analogous to the circumstances of an impermanent citizen. It was also an attempt to provide a faithful counterweight to the deception of a circumscribed free press.

The striking “Push < > Pull” video consists of a shifting panorama of crowd images in tumultuous anti-government demonstrations. The unfocused projection bears an unmasking stripe that sweeps across the haze like a searchlight. Fleeting images are intensified by a detached soundtrack of voices that swell with the gliding slit of illumination.

The “PUSHPULL>01-07” installation of large draped prints evoke tragedy, with gestural abstraction drifting over an assembly of standard-bearing flag forms. Color is somber and tertiary, almost nocturnal. The banners are indirectly lit with shadows spilling across peeling walls that appear recently excavated. Each draped form bares a bestial detail that represents nothing less than a coiled tattoo wound.

Abstraction embodies crises other than internal disciplinary critiques, ones like pictorial cuts and structural unravelling. It’s been effectively cathartic and reformative over decades – a century really, exposing and destabilizing binary logic. But it also tolerates irony and sometimes censure.  Echeverría’s contours and volumes unfold organically, even with the proportions of technology present in her method. Her subject of political and economic inequity is tempered by an asymmetrical beauty and soft landing for thorny parables of nation and allegiances.