Faculty of Art

Photography

Ernesto Cabral de Luna

El Palacio de Fierro

Rebar columns sticking out of Mexican homes are often mistaken as being unfinished, they are actually left with the hope of someday building a second floor - signs of an optimistic perspective of better things to come. The image's industrial themes are further reinforced by the rust from the metal bleeding through the image.

“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."”