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veronica (at) winterbureau.com

Veronica Corzo-Duchardt is a queer Cuban-American artist and designer living and working in Los Angeles, CA.

Statement

Influenced by my Cuban heritage, my work engages with popular representations of Cuba to reflect upon tensions between personal and cultural identity, memory, history, and nostalgia. I use a variety of media including screenprints, photography, objects, text, mixed-media, and digital platforms to explore the multivalent ways we share and preserve our individual and collective histories. Research, collection, and documentation play a significant role in my practice; I search for traces of the invisible stories contained within the everyday objects and materials that surround us. My process explores texture as form through the abstraction of photographs, scans, and photocopies.

My current project, “Surface Histories,” is a print series that engages with Havana’s architectural facades, based on photographs from my first trip to Cuba. As a first-generation Cuban-American, I hovered between tourist and native, aware of my place between these two worlds. Using a macro lens, I shot close-ups of walls, sidewalks, and textiles, envisioning Cuba’s surfaces as material evidence that functions as portals through time, witnesses to individual and collective stories of a place. I digitally isolate and augment particular layers and marks to bring a tactile sense of the material to the forefront. The resulting prints have a deliberately minimal, contemporary aesthetic, pushing beyond the recirculated images of romantic ruin.

In my previous project, “The Neche Collection,” I worked from a collection of objects that I mined from my grandfather’s house after his death. These belongings were a mixture of personal, political, and mundane; many were possessions sent through the mail from Cuba to the US in preparation for exile. The project ran as a daily blog, nechecollection.com, which told the story of Neche’s life through the objects he amassed. It ran from April 15, 2011 to Oct 28, 2011, with 149 objects and 29 limited-edition screenprints that translated these artifacts into modern, abstract images. My projects are iterative and occupy various spaces—in galleries, online, on social media platforms, and in the home. They are motivated by a desire to preserve our tangible history and to reimagine its place in our contemporary culture.

Bio

Veronica Corzo-Duchardt (b.1978) is Cuban-American visual artist and designer. Corzo-Duchardt received her MFA in Studio Art in 2008 and an MFA in Writing in 2009 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; Centro Pablo Cultural Center, Havana, Cuba; Public Works Gallery, Chicago, IL. Their prints and artist books are held in permanent collections at: the Newberry Library, Chicago, IL; the Joan Flasch Artist’s Book Collection, Chicago, IL; the Museum of Design Zürich, Switzerland.