CATHERINE TAFUR: FLIGHT

March 10 - May 5, 2023

Maus Contemporary is excited to announce Catherine Tafur: Flight, the artist’s second one-person exhibition with the gallery.

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.

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.

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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?