MFAs Roma Ingrid James and Guido Mena exhibit at FIU Project Room, Bakehouse Art Complex

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The FIU Art + Art History Project Room at Bakehouse Art Complex featured work by MFA candidates Roma Ingrid James and Guido Mena.

Statement about each artist’s work are below:

My dreams manifested in my subconscious are now a reality and have become the subject of my painting. It is necessary to paint them within 24 hours of their being so as not to lose the truth they reveal. While I communicate my imagination…, I identify with this natural process that defines my artwork as a visual artist.
– Roma Ingrid James

With the recent changes that have been taking place in Cuba under the Obama Administration, I have been inclined to investigate my Cuban/American heritage through identity, recollection and displacement, mainly passed down through oral traditions. The older generation of Cuban exiles have been slowly passing away. With their demise, they take with them an inherent culture full of histories, customs, arts and religion. I have sat through countless narratives that speak of past histories, encompassed with truths and myths and invariably engulfed in tragedy. In these narratives, the importance of traditions remains, but details vary from one person to the next. These images have been fixed in my mind since I was a child – appropriated memories of a place of which I have no recollections. 

Through my work I am attempting to develop imagery that could express this struggle, to provide a context where these appropriated memories are expressed through suggestive organic forms rich in color but, on close examination, fragmented, representing the displacement of a culture where the struggle of exile is always present and the past is slowly being assimilated into new traditions.
– Guido Mena

Roma Ingrid James and Guido Mena are both Masters of Fine Arts students at FIU. The Artist Residency exhibition was curated by Brittni Winkler, third-year Masters in Fine Arts: Curatorial Practice Track candidate and FIU Art + Art History Project Room coordinator.

Artist Residency: Roma Ingrid James and Guido Mena was on display in the FIU Art + Art History Project Room at Bakehouse Art Complex: 561 NW 32 Street, Miami, Florida 33127.

In the featured image, the artwork on the left is by Guido Mena, and the artwork on the right is by Roma Ingrid James.

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