Catherine Tafur - Maus Contemporary

FLIGHT

The cultural shock of childhood immigration can leave a deep psychic mark, and lead to a lifelong search for identity. My family was able to leave the violence plaguing Peru in the 80s and transplant me into the safety and promise of the US, one the greatest oppressors in the world.

I need to know where I come from. I look back and see the Peru of my childhood, but when I look deeper and further back there’s pre-colonial indigenous Peru.

As a queer multiracial immigrant woman living in the US, my desire is always to be in solidarity with the oppressed. While examining my Peruvian roots and the experience and mix of cultures that make me who I am, it becomes difficult to tease out what comes from adjacency to the coastal Lima elite, versus what comes from the resilience of pre-colonial Andean culture. This is further complicated by how my North American adult lens affects all of this. This exhibition is an examination of this search for identity and the complications that arise.

This body of work uses various cultural as well as personal symbols. Flight refers to both the condor and the airplane. The condor was first worshiped by the ancient Incas and later adopted as a national symbol for Peru. The airplane is how I came to the US, a common method of immigration. Flight also refers to fear, and escape. Flight is a passage.

The use of gold throughout refers to the theft of Inca gold, the first impulse of colonization that continued through modern history.

Guns and rifles allude to both violence of Sendero Luminoso, the Maoist terrorists active in Peru in the 80s and 90s, and to mass shootings in the US today.

These works are a way to search for and struggle with hybrid identities of colonizer and colonized, conquistador versus indigenous, and how these identities coexist within me. The history of violence is palpable. Theft, genocide and exploitation are part of it. Even in modern times the melding of cultures can easily become appropriation, and worse, can be used to further oppress. So how do I decolonize my mind? How do I decolonize my art? How do I accept these hybrid identities without replicating the immoral mindset of colonization? And how much of this mindset have I internalized?

- Catherine Tafur

“During the 80s and into the early 90s, Peru was terrorized by a communist-Maoist-guerrilla-insurgency group called the Communist Party of Peru – Shining Path, or in Spanish, ‘Sendero Luminoso.’ They began an armed struggle against the State, killing tens of thousands of innocent people, ravaged the countryside in the sierra and made their way to the coastal capital, Lima, where my family lived.

I grew uRana Plaza in Savar: Death of a Thousand Workers, 2014p with constant blackouts (because the Senderistas would target and dynamite the electrical towers) and bombs that shook our house, waking me at night, as I screamed for my mom. My childhood mind had no knowledge or understanding of what was really going on in Peru, so all I knew was that Sendero were communists and communists were monsters because they bombed and killed people. Imagine my shock when I first read the communist manifesto as a teenager in the U.S. and found that this wasn't necessarily the case. My memories of Sendero's bombs and my childhood fear of communism are the seeds that led to my interests in political systems. My experience of moving to American suburbia was confusing because I was very safe, but miserable. Being a lesbian immigrant in the late 80s and early 90s in suburbia was awful. I also was slowly learning about the malevolence and violence of capitalism. I'm now anti-capitalist as I'm sure is obvious with paintings such as Rana Plaza in Savar: Death of a Thousand Workers (2014, shown on right).”

excerpt from Catherine Tafur’s conversation with artist Eric Fischl included in Tafur’s monograph "Yearning To Breathe Free"

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In 2011, Tafur’s paintings registered the breakneck pace at which the world changed around her. This was a year that began with the promise of democratic revolution in Egypt’s Tahrir Square and spiraled out of control: the Syrian Civil War began in March; the Obama administration killed Osama bin Laden in May; and Muammar Gaddafi was executed by Libyan rebel forces in October following an earlier NATO military intervention in the country. Simplistic narratives about good triumphing over evil no longer felt appropriate. And outside of Tunisia, the Arab Spring failed to deliver new democratic governments to North Africa and the Middle East. In particular, Egypt found itself caught between the harsh rule of a military junta and the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamic fundamentalism.

Revolution, 2011The above-described events inspired Tafur’s “Revolution” (2011), shown on left, an intricately surreal painting that coordinates the weightless hope of change with the crushing gravity of reality. The artist handicaps the canvas’ largest subject with a leg crutch. Nevertheless, this man — now sporting the idealized body of a Greek sculpture and the eye of a nightmarish cyclops — continues to protest. This distortion of the Egyptian rioter conveys the inability to parse progress from regress in the Arab Spring. What may initially look like change may lead to more of the dictatorial same. Similarly, the Tahrir Square protested never delivered on the new Egypt it had promised.

Tafur illustrates these dashed hopes compositionally, exploding the already fractured picture-plane with a nod to the precise geometries of Russian Suprematism.

Founded by Kazimir Malevich on the heels of 1917’s Russian Revolution, the artist wrote that “art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners. It wants to have nothing further to do with the object.” In that way, it was a cultural caesura that complimented Leninism’s break from the country’s czarist regime. Spiritually, it was a reinvention of Eastern Orthodox mysticism and iconography. Tafur draws parallels to Suprematism in “Revolution” as a gesture toward the failed revolutions of the past. And while her affinity for the avant-garde aesthetic is clear, the artist cannot help but notice its shortcomings in affecting real positive, political change.

excerpt from “The Personal Is Always Political: The History Paintings of Catherine Tafur”, an essay by Zachary Small included in Tafur’s monograph "Yearning To Breathe Free"

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus, 1883
(On a plaque mounted inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty)

BIOGRAPHY

Catherine Tafur is a Peruvian born artist based in New York City. Tafur spent her childhood in Peru in a bicultural home with a Japanese mother and Peruvian father before relocating to the US. The content of her work is informed by the experience of her youth as a queer, multiracial immigrant in American suburbia. Her drawings and paintings explore themes of death, violence, vulnerability and loss of innocence. Her subjects are political and personal, feminist and confrontational. Since studying at the Cooper Union School of Art on a full scholarship, she has had numerous group and solo exhibitions.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Painting is my method of mourning. Unbridled feminist rage, anger towards the evils of capitalism and patriarchy, and the emotional fallout of shattered expectations and broken belief system are the fodder that drive the content and shape my aesthetics. The failures of our social and political systems have exposed humanity’s incomprehensible capacity for violence. Witnessing such endless destruction leads to despair. The monster of late capitalist hegemony seems insurmountable, and modes of resistance begin to feel like Sisyphean tasks. Art is a method to wrestle with this disillusionment, to grieve for our loss of innocence, and to release collective anger in a visual scream. Here is Painting as funerary object and conduit for rage.

PRESS QUOTES

“Ms. Tafur has skillfully translated the confusion of our voyeuristic era, and the sinister underpinnings of our current global theatre in a concise, albeit disturbing image that speaks to our time… one of the most emotionally intelligent and visually pleasing shows I’ve seen all year.”
– Ola Manana, Talking Grid, 2012

“Political art has the power to comment on global situations and often dig deeper into what lies at the core, reflecting an alternative to what the media feeds its audience. Such is the case with artist Catherine Tafur…”
– Steve V. Rodriguez, Progressive Pulse, 2012

“News junkies may be intrigued by Catherine Tafur’s interpretations of current events. She puts a surreal spin on events that felt, at the time, truly surreal. Her paintings also point out the archetypes that help us explain traumatic events to ourselves.”
– Art & Culture Gallery Notes, Hotel Americano, 2012

“Tafur’s riveting, contemporary works explode with instances of violence, death, and madness.”
– Alison Martin, Examiner, 2012

“Her images are strong and contemporary. They are a unique mix of avant-garde, horror and science fiction, with both North and South American iconography: Yankees on one hand, Incas on the other. It is a powerful, mythical presentation of a human, especially feminine struggle for normal existence as seen through the eyes of a very personal, deep experience, growing up within the horrifying urban alien matrix.”
– Uri Lehavi, Art Channel, 2011

“…her work makes us aware of the irreconcilable conflict between our extraordinary capacity to love and our terror that we may not be worth loving. What we come quickly to understand from this work is that what pulls at our hearts eventually tears open our flesh.”
– Eric Fischl, 2010

“Connecting with Tafur’s art is not what happens – the shock of the grotesque surreal repels, but then locks in for real. It’s the wicked humor and high technique that does it: the shark mermaid beribboned B&D high above Times Square, Pig Beast as a baby, Elephant Turtle whose ears are legs. Not your standard bestiary. Not your standard art. So gimme more!”
– Bob Holman, 2010

“…Catherine Tafur approaches her work with great earnestness, but this is not the only reason that we find such a fresh vitality in her art… We are reminded that for an artist, the act of making art is an act of introspection.”
– Noorelkys Blazekovic, Irreversible: An International Art Project Magazine, 2010

“These “changelings” bare their innocence, pain, sexual pervasiveness and mutations openly to the viewer. Both beautiful and disturbing, some recall mythical combinations of human-beast not made from divine sources but rather painful interventions.”
– Diane Bowen, Saatchi Online, 2009