Material
softcover
Size
111 pgs.
8 x 10 x 1/4 in.
About the book
Features an essay by editor and publisher Franky Piña in both Spanish and English alongside a series of print works by prolific artist Carlos Barberena.
“For me, art is a powerful form of communication that I employ to reflect on and question the issues that we encounter in a consumer society. Lead by corporation-friendly governments, we are often indifferent to environmental pollution and socio-political injustices. In this series of prints I appropriate and re-contextualize masterpieces, borrowing their compositional strategies and sometimes their titles, but inserting contemporary imagery with sarcasm and satire to create new works. These pieces take a critical view on different corporations that are using GMO’s in their products. They condemn the way policies that favor these corporations are affecting our natural resources, health, environmental pollution, human rights issues, immigration policies, labor rights, violence, wars, global warming, etc, provoking a catastrophe in our contemporary society. With my work I am trying to challenge the status quo in this “fast food society” making satirical relief prints that emphasize both concept and craft. PROPAGANDA”
About the artist
Carlos Barberena (b.1972) is a Contemporary Nicaraguan Printmaker best known for his satirical relief prints and the use of images from pop culture, as well as from political and cultural tragedies.
In his art, Barberena has consistently reflected on the cycles of repression and resistance and its relationship to the Diaspora in which he has lived, throughout dictatorship, revolution, erasure, renewal, hope, dictatorship and repression. His prints center these types of life experiences occurring far beyond his country. He creates to counteract the great silence around repression occurring globally believing we are all intimately connected to it. He seeks to demystify the “foreign” experience, to bridge the distances that life across any border or wall produces, but also, the difference in the content of these experiences. He creates to bring awareness to the interconnectedness among them, focusing on injustices of social, political, economic and environmental injustice. At times he evokes using satirical images, at others, through the mundane, unseen things people carry: memories, attachments, relationships and traumas. In each he highlights the myriad of cycles of oppression and struggle.
Currently Barberena lives and works in Chicago, where he runs the printmaking projects: Bandolero Press & La Calaca Press. He is also a member of the Instituto Grafico de Chicago.
