FIU Art + Art History student Edison Peñafiel has been selected to display his work in Atlantic Center for the Arts’s 27th Annual University Student Exhibition.
Founded in in 1977 by Doris Leeper, an internationally known sculptor and painter, as well as a visionary environmentalist, Atlantic Center for the Arts (ACA) is a non-profit multidisciplinary artist residency facility located in New Smyrna Beach, Florida.
Peñafiel was selected by juror James Hyde to participate in the University Student Exhibition. Peñafiel will represent Florida International University and will exhibit alongside Nasser Almulhim (University of West Florida), Kennedy Bailey (University of South Florida), and Taylor Finke (University of South Florida).
Edison Peñafiel was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador and is a visual artist currently residing in Fort Lauderdale. His multimedia installations and photographic works has been exhibited throughout the state of Florida. His most recent solo exhibition was at Centre Gallery at the University of South Florida. He has been in multiple group shows that include the NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood Art and Culture Center, and Little Haiti Cultural Center, among others. (Source: Edison Peñafiel)
Peñafiel’s work functions as a vehicle for questioning social injustice, along with expressing ideas about displacement and the worldwide migrant crisis caused by economic, political and religious instability. His practice combines techniques that include photography, audio, video, drawing, painting, collage, sculpture, and found objects to create the visuals. This combination of mediums materialize as a multimedia installation that displays a surreal or augmented reality. The work borrows the aesthetic of movements such as Expressionism, German Expressionism Films, Russian Constructivism, and Deconstructivism, allowing him to create expressive characters, surreal settings, deconstructed structures, and sharp-edged architecture. As for the concepts behind his work, Peñafiel creates metaphors influenced by ironic sayings and excerpts from songs or poems that evoke and remind of the absurdity of current global events. (Source: Edison Peñafiel)
Atlantic Center for the Arts’s 27th Annual University Student Exhibition will open with a reception on Friday, May 20th, 2016 at 5:00PM at Atlantic Center for the Arts Pabst Visitor Center & Gallery: 1414 Art Center Avenue, New Smyrna Beach, FL 32168.
The exhibition will run until August 13th, 2016.
The featured image is Edison Peñafiel’s 2015 video work, “¡Correlé, Correlé, Correlá, Por Aquí, Por Aquí, Por Allá, Correlé, Correlé, Correlá, Correlé Que Te Van a Matar! / Run, Run, Run, Over Here, Over Here, Over There, Run, Run, Run, Run, They Are Going To Kill You!”
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