5 X 5 :: Acarigua-Araure + New York

Juana Valdes's works range from sculptural installations to hand-crafted works of fabric, photography and videos. Born in Cuba and raised in Miami, her work manages to balance a combination of atmospheric storytelling, insistent feminist inquiry along with a streak of rural mysticism and an ongoing interest in the semiotics of commercial, mass produced imagery. Her works in photography and installation deal with migration and transculturation in a direct and a poetic way recreating a sense of displacement and recollection. It sees migration as a complex process that involves both the original, diasporic community as well as the new homeland. The work ponders the migrant's search for utopia, questions the construction of identity "Latino" or "other" and representation in mainstream America, investigates the connection of multiple cultures and nations.

The dynamics of her work lies in its transition from sculpture to installation to performance shifting fields and recognition questioning where is the art and when does it separate from daily life. Coming from a tradition of conceptual and performance art she employs the sources of this tradition and its historical influences in a multicultural approach to art by exposing the influences of pop culture in art. Her work circumscribes issues of displacement and personal transcendence via the everyday object as a personal and time based reference. These artworks bring into consciousness past histories with present day experiences.

Her work can be see at the Queens Library in New York in a present exhibition Cultural Redress: Reinterpreting Fashions from the Index of American Design and at the New Jersey City Museum current exhibition Tropicalisms. Valdes has participated in artist residencies at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn and a three-month program for international artists and designers at The European Ceramic Work Center in Holland. She has participated in exhibitions in Holland, Australia, Belgium, France, and Poland. In New York her work has been exhibited at a combination of alternative spaces, galleries, and museums: Art in General, El Museo del Barrio, WhiteBox Gallery, Bronx River Art Center, and Nohra Haime Gallery. In 1998 she was a US participant for The P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center International and National Studio Residency Program and exhibition at PS.1 Institute for Contemporary Art. She received a Pollack-Krasner grant in 1998. She is also a recipient of the Cuban Artist Fund Grant and was awarded the Cosby fellowship to attend Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1995. Valdes was born in Cuba and came to the United States with her family in 1971. She presently resides in New York City and teaches at Brooklyn College CUNY.