Amalia Galdona Broche is a United States-based artist of Santa Clara, Cuba and works with textiles and fibers to create installations that materialize psychological landscapes of nostalgia and remembrance. Broche earned a BFA and a BA in Sculpture and Art History from Jacksonville University in Florida, and has participated in residencies at the New York Academy of Fine Arts, the Studios at MASS MoCA and WOC Residency. Her work has been exhibited at various institutions such as The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, the Parachute Factory, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Field Projects, The Sculptors Alliance, and so on. Broche recently graduated from University of Kentucky with her MFA in Visual Studies.
Broche's work materializes and translates real and psychological landscapes, investigating identity, personal and collective memory, as well as belief systems and transculturation processes. Through textiles, she studies the complexities of identity-building as a Cuban-born woman touched by displacement, migration, and transculturation. Feeding from the cultural, aesthetic, and natural environment in which she resides, Broche uses layers in her work to obscure individual objects and textiles, complicating and entangling embedded histories beyond recognition. Via knotting, weaving, ropemaking, wrapping and other accumulative methods, her sculptures explore the role and definition of textiles in today’s world, focusing on the woven plane as a second skin, a weather-protective and complex reconfiguration of material, ideas, and memories. Manifested in organic, female, and generative forms, my work acts as an offering, and act of sharing and expressing an identity that is multilingual, abstract, and obscured yet nuanced and familiar, as is the process of living in liminality. Soft and malleable yet playful and colorful, she is crafting a visual language where verbal communication has been rendered ineffective to communicate the multiplicity of identities within all of us.
Quinn Alexandria Hunter is a sculptor and performance artist who works primarily with hair and the African American female body as material. She was born and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina and received her MFA at Ohio University in 2020. She is the recipient of theI. Hollis Parry/ Ann Parry Billman Award (2019). Hunter has exhibited and performed nationally. She is interested in the erasure of history from spaces and how the contemporary uses of space impacts the way we as a culture see the past.
The erasing of labor renders bodies, the spaces they work in, and the work itself invisible. This erasure of labor is amplified in the labor done by women of color, in particular, the labor done by African American women in contemporary and historic domestic spaces. Quinn Hunter looks at the way this erasure of historic labor is connected to the contemporary and how it affects space around us. Through the use of hair tools and hair weave as material, she is connecting the historic Black female body to spaces that they have been contemporarily erased from. Her objects reference the space of the antebellum plantation house, and the objects of luxury that could be purchased because of the wealth that was amassed through the erased slave labor and those bodies. Through the labor of creating the objects and using artificial hair integrations, a material that is distinctly related and connected to the contemporary Black female body, she shows how interwoven the erased labor of African American women is to the antebellum period and the wealth amassed during. She is interrupting the countless stories and tales that have formed the myth that has been built to uphold the dream-like memory of the Antebellum south. Through re-inscribing the erased labor of historic African American women and allowing their work to be remembered through her own contemporary labor. In making, she remembers, and through her remembering, we all remember.
Hannah Smith recently graduated with their MFA from here at UK this past spring. Smith is currently teaching graphic design and sculpture at the University of Kentucky and Northern Kentucky University. They maintain an experimental and interdisciplinary practice informed through various residency and assistantship experiences. Smith’s artistic practice investigates relationship dynamics and power structures with an aesthetic that balances such subject matter with elements of experimentation and playfulness. Their most recent residencies include a Neon Tube bending residency at Glas Works in Raleigh, NC and two which were postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic at Zaratan Arte Contemporanea in Lisbon, Portugal and the Print Shop LA. Smith is preparing work for two exhibitions this Fall at the Bolivar Gallery and the Midsouth Sculpture Alliance’s Interdisciplinary Sculpture Conference at the University of Cincinnati.
Smith creates installations that investigate the psychological consequences resulting from abuse of power, societal expectations, and perceptions of norms through symbolic landscapes and subliminal spaces. In doing so, they unveil and disrupt the inadvertent and often unseen violence imposed upon those marginalized by systemic inequities. Inspired by 20th century avant-garde movements and the philosophy of feminist punk culture, Smith's work refuses to maintain a hierarchy of norms for creative expression. Toward this end, they synthesize various methods— performance, installation, animation, printmaking, mold-making, neon-light design, paper sculpture, and gastronomy— to imagine spaces that fuse fact and fantasy, resistance and resilience, humor and hope for the future.