Artist Statement
Image courtesy of Jessie Sara English
Born in Puerto Rico and raised in New Mexico, I developed a double sense of home, which has given me a unique perspective on post-colonial, feminist, and border identity.
I manipulate photographs taken by my great-great-grandmother, establishing inter-generational collaborations with my ancestors, to explore my family mythology, storytelling, and memory. By cutting and stitching into images from my family photographic archive, I insert my hand into the largely undocumented stories of Caribbean women, weaving my story together with theirs.
In my most recent work, I recollect and recreate the floor tile patterns from my great-grandmother's house. The tile patterns, common throughout Latin America and reminiscent of Arab mosaics, are one of my earliest memories, and are one of the only memories I share with the rest of my family; they have come to signify family, memory, and loss. Story-telling is key to my cultural identity; the headspace of story is my home. I create pen and charcoal drawings from family photographs, as well as my own interpretations of memories that have been passed down to me through stories, in order to locate my place within this familial narrative. Using a thick layer of charcoal, I create a keyhole effect in order to mimic the shadow I see around these inherited memories. It speaks to the tradition of pinhole photography and silent film, but I relate to it as if I have a flashlight in a dark room, and I can only illuminate one detail at a time; I am never able to see the full picture.
BIO
Kai Margarida-Ramirez has been showing nationally since 2009. Her work is in the permanent collection of the National Hispanic Cultural Center in New Mexico, where she returned in 2014 with her latest body of work in the exhibition Papel! Pico, Rico y Chico. In 2011 her work was exhibited alongside Pepón Osorio and Amalia Mesa-Bains in Latino/a Imaginary: Intersection of Word and Image at 516 ARTS in Albuquerque. That same year, Kai attended Emerging Indigenous Voices: A New Generation of Artists, an artist residency in San Francisco. In 2014, Kai was an Artist Fellow at the de Young Museum, in partnership with the Galería de la Raza, for Paper and Blade: Storytelling Under the Knife.
Other recent exhibitions include Before at The Kitchen in New York, I’ll Show You Mine: Contemporary Artists Explore Family Portraiture at the Palo Alto Art Center, Borderlands at the University of South Dakota Art Gallery, Art Not Without___ at Amos Eno Gallery in Brooklyn, and Radiant Geometries at Skylight Gallery in New York.
Kai received her MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons the New School for Design in 2014 and is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Email: [email protected]
I manipulate photographs taken by my great-great-grandmother, establishing inter-generational collaborations with my ancestors, to explore my family mythology, storytelling, and memory. By cutting and stitching into images from my family photographic archive, I insert my hand into the largely undocumented stories of Caribbean women, weaving my story together with theirs.
In my most recent work, I recollect and recreate the floor tile patterns from my great-grandmother's house. The tile patterns, common throughout Latin America and reminiscent of Arab mosaics, are one of my earliest memories, and are one of the only memories I share with the rest of my family; they have come to signify family, memory, and loss. Story-telling is key to my cultural identity; the headspace of story is my home. I create pen and charcoal drawings from family photographs, as well as my own interpretations of memories that have been passed down to me through stories, in order to locate my place within this familial narrative. Using a thick layer of charcoal, I create a keyhole effect in order to mimic the shadow I see around these inherited memories. It speaks to the tradition of pinhole photography and silent film, but I relate to it as if I have a flashlight in a dark room, and I can only illuminate one detail at a time; I am never able to see the full picture.
BIO
Kai Margarida-Ramirez has been showing nationally since 2009. Her work is in the permanent collection of the National Hispanic Cultural Center in New Mexico, where she returned in 2014 with her latest body of work in the exhibition Papel! Pico, Rico y Chico. In 2011 her work was exhibited alongside Pepón Osorio and Amalia Mesa-Bains in Latino/a Imaginary: Intersection of Word and Image at 516 ARTS in Albuquerque. That same year, Kai attended Emerging Indigenous Voices: A New Generation of Artists, an artist residency in San Francisco. In 2014, Kai was an Artist Fellow at the de Young Museum, in partnership with the Galería de la Raza, for Paper and Blade: Storytelling Under the Knife.
Other recent exhibitions include Before at The Kitchen in New York, I’ll Show You Mine: Contemporary Artists Explore Family Portraiture at the Palo Alto Art Center, Borderlands at the University of South Dakota Art Gallery, Art Not Without___ at Amos Eno Gallery in Brooklyn, and Radiant Geometries at Skylight Gallery in New York.
Kai received her MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons the New School for Design in 2014 and is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Email: [email protected]
