Ernesto Cabral de Luna

Cuetero (Firework Man)

Community member putting the finishing touches on a firework figure for La Quema del Panzon, celebrated by the members of Santa Maria Xixitla at the Great Pyramid of Cholula. The man's hands are visible adding fireworks onto the structure of the figure which has been adorned by colorful ribbons. Rust bleeds through the image from the metal canvas.

“Inspired by 20th century Mexican Exvotos, votive paintings made on sheets of tin serving as a form of gratitude to a religious figure, this series is a study of memory, focusing on how personal archives facilitate the construction and struggle to retain an individual and cultural identity.Utilizing the structure of votive these paintings (retablos), my image transfer collages onto different mediums like watercolor paper and different types of rusted metals function as a form of gratitude to the memories themselves. As an immigrant who grew up in Canada, these memories have provided me with tangible visual records, aiding me in constructing a semblance of where I come from, allowing me to speculate on an alternate reality where I grew up in Mexico, surrounded by my extended family and imbedded in my culture.I was inspired by Alberto Manguel who speaks on how the artist in exile’s "faithful memory will betray his country’s present reality - the exile sees the country as it never is... everything he does is colored by something half remembered... it is a country drawn from memory, from things half known or half dreamt, and the exiled doesn't ask too earnestly if there really is a difference.” In this sense, working through appropriation and reinterpretation allows for me to depict and work through my relationship to absence, nostalgia, and the inevitably distorted and faulty functions of memory.This method of analog image manipulation allows me to work through the photographs as memory of the idealized and the imaginary, and is in line with Susan Sontag's perception of images as fetish, which she states provided us with "an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal."”