JUANA VALDES

An Afro-Cuban artist based in Miami, Juana Valdes’ multi-disciplinary practice combines printmaking, photography, sculpture, ceramics, and installation to explore issues of race, transnationalism, gender, labor, and class in the global south. Functioning as an archive of collected, arranged, and transformed objects, Valdes’ work interrogates the representations of Latinos, Caribbeans, and Blacks in mainstream America through personal and historical experiences. Considering migration as a complex process that involves both the homespace of the diasporic community as well as the new homeland, Valdes uses objects to map the terrain of the multiple cultures that constitute her own identity and its continuous flux as it is reshaped by experiences of displacement and transculturation.

ABOUT THE WORK:

Hanging By is a series of nine cast bone china sheets with screen-printed text. The text presents variations of a singular phrase stemming from the expression "by the skin of your teeth," which describes a situation from which one barely manages to escape. The different versions of the text reinvent and recontextualize the phrase, leaving our understanding of it in a tense, precarious position. The original phrase first appears in English in the Geneva Bible (ca. 1560) in Job 19:20, providing a literal translation of the original Hebrew: "I haue escaped with the skinne of my tethe."