Grand Opening of Arte en Guadiana, Guardians of Time, A piece of Sky

To be sure, there are many art galleries in San Miguel. But Arte en Guadiana, San Miguel’s newest gallery, is a bit different. Arte en Guadiana represents Lucille Kligerman, one of San Miguel’s most senior artists, with her vivid and joyful paintings and encaustics. Imelda Terán (age 19) is one of San Miguel’s youngest talents.

Although she started painting and printmaking only two years ago, Terán already has had two collective exhibitions and an individual exhibition at Bellas Artes.

Mike Kligerman’s lyrical paintings of country life, Steve Moe’s mysterious abstractions and Barbara Lemke’s expressionist moods round out a selection that is surprisingly harmonious in its diversity. Every wineglass, goblet or flower vase created by Barbara Roberts is a unique piece of art that beautifies the home. Edith Kyla Bramson presents her exquisite collection of textiles and crafts from around the world. To sum it up: Arte en Guadiana is a little gallery that has a lot to present.

Arte en Guadiana is centrally located in colonia Guadiana, the lovely area off the Ancha de San Antonio, on Calle Guadiana between Casita Feliz and the little park. It’s close enough to Centro to walk to easily, and parking is readily available.

The artists of Arte en Guadiana invite the public to their grand opening on Saturday, February 11, from 4pm to 7pm at Guadiana 17A. For more information, call 152-3602.

Gallery Grand Opening
Arte en Guadiana
Saturday, February 11, 4 – 7pm
Guadiana 17-A
152-3602

In almost continuous exile, the ever-present conjecture occurs to me: How different is my perception of this world from the way it appears to those who have inhabited this place—their place, a single place—for millennia?

As I gaze at Sebastián Belaustegui’s exquisitely made images, a singular disquieting notion stirs somewhere in my thoughts—a sense of loss, of enervating exhaustion—and haunts the better part of my time. Difficult to frame, I fall back into the relative assurance that all of us came out of one place, and moved on to another. Even within communities of ancient duration, transhumance—trek and journey—takes place continually.

In Guardianes del Tiempo (Guardians of Time), the gorgeous book Belaustegui made of his photographs of indigenous peoples of Central and Latin America, one exquisite image after another unfolds around beautiful, informative text. In the book’s prologue, Portuguese writer José Saramago writes that these images are of people who live in duration and, thus, may be more contemporary than we who live in the “modern” world. Certainly, it is we “modern” people who seem more ephemeral, more at risk of termination, more marked for extinction. Saramago writes in Journey to Portugal, “Our new technologies have transformed us into consumers and ignoramuses.”

All will pass, I think, gazing at these images. All is contemporary for us—human and fragile—in the scope of time, and what presences will remain when we are all gone?

Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine like Belaustegui, kindly informs us that Dante wrote in a letter that his Comedia may be read four different ways, of which the literal is but one.

This is true, I believe of all images created in the spirit of art—all that are without the taint of kitsch, mendacity or cynicism. How curious that we give credence to the visions of the ancients, yet can’t accept those of our time. At what date, asks Borges, do true visions end and apocrypha take their place.

If you see only one image in this amazing display of photographs, go to the image I ponder at this moment. You’ll see a Huichol woman with a child on her back, holding a rope leading to a burro standing to her left and slightly closer to the camera. We see a document—beautiful in its person and its composition, its light and its moon—that gives a sense of the dignity, the poise and beauty, the universality of the gesture, of a woman and child and burro, of this community and of this species. The text in Guardianes del Tiempo tells us that her child is the son of a Huichol shaman, whose powers are hereditary. Now we enter a time that has mythic aspects—which is already implied in the image. We can imagine all those present in this world if we but look. The dead are testimony to a past in which all that was necessary already existed. And those yet to come will be witness and testimony of how those before played their part in the scheme of things.

We need no apocalypse of St John. We need only to feel the presence of the progeny of our offspring to know the end-time, the final judgment. Salvation is an ethical process. And these brilliant photographs show that we heed that. Belaustegui writes that his companions in these works are “guardians of the natural order.” Perhaps we study these images with eschatological intent. Blake—holy visionary Willy Blake—wrote, “The fool shall not enter into glory, no matter how holy he be.” He also wrote that another requirement for salvation is to be an artist.

Look at the clothing, the terraced hillsides of crops, the way rope is tied and the bags of chili and maize. We linger on these images of the souls of the guardians of time to comprehend how their dignity—and ours—affects the world and keeps it in order. Dignity, grace and artistry. We look at the people, the souls, in these photographs and see heaven and hell are in all—as well as plants, mountains, seas, continents, minerals, trees, herbs, flowers, thorns, birds, reptiles, fish, tools and buildings. A cosmos, as the poet said, in all manner of time.

I look at the photographs, and then turn and go to a mirror. If I understand them, I better get to work.

Sebastián Belaustegui was born in 1969 and is currently living in Tepoztlan, Mexico. He has been an independent documentary photographer since 1991, and he dedicates himself to photographing the native world of Latin America. Currently, Belaustegui is working on a new editorial project called Africa in America, documenting the heritage of Africa on the American continent.

One of his photographs graced the cover of National Geographic magazine’s February 2005 Spanish issue. His work has also been published in magazines such as Camera Art, Planet, and Gatopardo, as well as in newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and the Sunday Times.

Belaustegui’s book Guardianes del Tiempo (Guardians of Time: Portraits of the Spirit of Latin America) was published in 2003. For its development, he traveled through ten countries and lived in 25 indigenous communities. The book’s introduction was written by José Saramago, whose Journey to Portugal won the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature. Copies of Guardianes del Tiempo are available at Galería LeNoir during this special exhibition.

Beverly Sky, an artist with a world-renowned reputation in her medium of paper pulp painting, will be exhibiting new works inspired by Mexican landscapes at Galería del Centro, located inside the Hotel Casa Mexicana, in Pozos.

The opening reception will be on Sunday, February 5, at 1pm.

First trained as a weaver and fiber artist, Sky began her career creating tapestries and then moved on to printmaking and papermaking. Finally she was introduced to the pulp painting techniques that led to a career as a papermaker and pulp painter for 25 years. Her extensive travels and world-wide studies, from Cambridge to Kyoto, have earned her respect and a reputation. As one of her devoted collectors said, “Acquiring a work by Beverly Sky is not collecting, it is more like a religious experience.”

In June 2003, the American Museum of Papermaking held a three-month solo exhibition of Sky’s 20-year retrospective. She currently has a grant to study traditional papermaking techniques at Mexico’s Bellas Artes, and she will explore the papermaking techniques of the Otomí Indian tribes of Mexico.

In her medium of paper-pulp painting, Sky has represented landscapes from New England to Mexico. About her work she says: “In working with landscape, what interests me is the challenge of re-creating and synthesizing my experience of the atmosphere of a particular place and time.

The use of paper as an integral part of the artwork, instead of just the recipient surface, continues to be a source of inspiration for my work. To inquire into the intricacies of a distant landscape, then, is to provoke thoughts about one’s own interior landscape, and the familiar landscapes of memory. The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves.”

About her technique she explains: “The work you are looking at is not painted onto the paper. The colors, the forms and textures are created by applying pigmented pulps (made from cellulose, specifically cotton and abaca) onto the surface of a freshly made sheet of paper, much like a fresco process. Since pulp is a fiber, one cannot apply the color with a brush. I use thin, laid-down layers of pulp and build up detail using applicator bottles, pouring, stenciling, and rubbing techniques to create the image. This technique is also known as paper pulp painting. When the composition is complete, the sheet is pressed and dried. The larger sheets of paper are created by spraying pigmented pulp through a compressor gun onto a large canvas. Occasionally, I will add some pastel or colored-pencil markings to highlight or accent some area of the work.”

For the past two years, Sky has been involved with the Faith Quilt Project, and has been creative director for two giant tapestries created for the sanctuary at Temple Beth Zion, in Brookline, Massachusetts. The installation of these quilts at the Boston Center for the Arts and the Boston Public Library are on her agenda for 2006.

Currently, Sky is living and teaching in her Boston studio and at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts.
The public is invited to meet this Austrian-born artist at the opening of her new exhibition North Meets South: Exploring New Landscapes, which continues through the month of March in Mineral de Pozos. For more information, contact Teresa Martínez, Gallery Director, at 01-442-293-0014.

North Meets South: Exploring New Landscapes
Works by Beverly Sky
Exhibition Opening
Sunday, February 5, 1pm
Galería del Centro
(inside Hotel Casa Mexicana)
in Mineral de Pozos