@joiriminaya en el booth de Calderón Gallery(@calderongallery )en el @thearmoryshow 2022 👏🏽💐🧡 ——————————- “The custom wallpaper [departs from the resemblance between] a mid-century sidewall repeating pattern of a lush green forest landscape from the J. C. Eisenhart Wallpaper Company, and a vista view of the overlook of the historic Quindaro Townsite, a significant area of the abolitionist community that was part of the anti-slavery resistance movement in Kansas City, Kansas.” While the serene, unpeopled landscape featured in Eisenhart’s postwar US design shows the bucolic countryside as a carefree playground where ideas of escapism could be projected, the vistas of Quindaro carry the memories of an entirely different idea and experience of escape, having served as a temporary place of refuge for self-liberated people of African descent going further north. Considering a history where landscape representation is tied to control through visual means, this design attempts to deconstruct the original Eisenhart design by retracing it’s elements and abstracting them through their reorganization in a way that is not trying to align into one idealized composition. This is achieved by painting each color separately (back-tracking a silkscreen process) to digitally recompose all these layers to form new relations, liberating them from the oppressive strategies of representation. “In this newly formed image, Minaya highlights the complex history of idealized places, both for early settlers and self-liberated African peoples in the post-Civil War years.” (Text in quotes from the exhibition at the Kemper Museum curatorial text by Jade Powers).