Visibility: Seeing and Being Seen

Curated by Delita Martin

Gabriel Garcia Roman

Graphic Impressions
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Artists
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Exhibition Artists
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Gabriel Garcia Roman

About the Artist

Gabriel Garcia Roman was born in Zacatecas, Mexico and raised in Chicago’s northwest side. He received his B.A. from The City College of New York where he studied Studio Art. Garcia Roman is a multi-disciplinary artist and craftsman who examines and decodes the politics of identity through intricate and process-based work. His art has been acquired by the International Center of Photography, Museum of Contemporary Religious Art and has been shown at the Museum of Latin American Art (Long Beach, CA), Cathedral of St. John the Divine (New York, NY), the Center for Photography at Woodstock (Woodstock, NY) and numerous other institutions and galleries.

Artist:

Gabriel Garcia Roman

Social media: @gbrlgrcrmn

Website: http://www.gabrielgarciaroman.com/

Exhibition

Visibility: Seeing and Being Seen

Artist Statement

Gabriel Garcia Roman is a multi-disciplinary artist exploring and decoding the world he lives in through labor intensive works. He weaves, slices, folds, and stitches through his varying identities, a process mirrored in his art.

He was first introduced to art through frescoes and paintings of saints, a visual language inherited from his Catholic and Mexican upbringing, but Garcia Roman’s life experiences generate further complexity into the baroque style.

Bespoke wooden frames, embroidery, and ceramic adornments breathe life into this portrait series and is a staple of Garcia Roman’s as he transfers these techniques into woodworking, ceramic, and textiles. Pushing the materials’ boundaries is an elaborate and intentional motif he deploys. The laborious nature of his practice induces rugged hands, a connection he makes to the memory of his working class father, and the ornate frames of his work tethers him to cultural diaspora and trips to visit his retired mother in Zacatecas where even the humblest of homes have gilded frames of the Virgen de Guadalupe. It’s these manual motions of in-between, across, and over where Garcia Roman meditates and unravels a sense of meaning through his art.