NADA MIAMI 2022

Featuring Amy Bravo

November 30th - December 3rd 2022

Swivel Gallery is proud to present a solo presentation by Amy Bravo in this year’s edition of NADA Miami for the TD Bank Curated Spotlight selected by Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels. The booth features a range of the artist’s practice including sculpture, installation, and a trio of dynamic large scale mixed media wall works.

Bravo’s oeuvre centers around vast concepts that somehow intersect through her compelling narratives which weave through her family's history, ancient mythology, and an unwritten future brimming with equal parts danger and destiny. It is a deeply honest, highly relatable, coming-of-age tale that delves into the growing pains of a young person’s battle against politics, parental expectations, and cultural norms striving to gain liberty while simultaneously retaining heritage. Hers is a long unspoken journey of a queer person clashing with hyper traditional Cuban and Italian lineage, digging to build her own house, while making the original one proud; to become a “Bravo.” Simultaneously, even her namesake is full of contradiction, originally deriving from latin etymology meaning ‘hero,’ and later in the medieval era "villain and assassin.” Still, her work does not hang on tropes as someone who hasn’t visited her ancestral country due to Cuba’s bureaucratic difficulties, but rather lives in a fog of memory inferred through a nostalgic relationship with her late grandparents, constantly revived by chimerical stories, aged photographs, and tchotchke cabinets that each leave behind a trace of information which constantly carry the artist on her path to autonomy.

In her unconventional approach to the medium of painting, Bravo utilizes irregularly shaped supports, often combining multiple layers and techniques such as found objects from personal archives, pieces of fabric, leather, and even dried leaves from plants pertinent to her mythological world, often starting with a graphic sketch of a loose allegory. She then intuitively adds and repurposes elements with sentimental attributes to build scenes that expand beyond the container, in turn taking over the wall between the figures movements typically accompanied by a set of whimsical architectural elements. Their end results seek to create an ineffable utopia in the vague outline of Cuba, one who's desire hinges on the question of what it means to love someone or someplace unconditionally, even in disagreement. What toll does this burden take? What are the realms of possibility? As time molds our independent histories, who are we, who were we, and who will we become?

This presentation's allegories circle around one of Bravo’s most recurring characters, the psychopomp rooster, evolving out of the mystic story of a picture spoken about by her father, but yet to be located over the course of three years; with that time, it has become a folk tale. The suppositious image features her aunt surrounded by a flock of hens, indicative of female kinship, on the one and only occasion she went to Cuba as a little girl. It was the last time anyone in the artist's known family has visited the island. This apologue has lingered with Bravo over those years and in turn the flock of hens have settled in her paintings, gathering around the feet of figures and becoming akin to both blood and found (queer) family members. And so, with the hen, naturally comes the rooster. A historically prevalent creature throughout many periods and cultures, Bravo’s is associated with Hermes, the Greek psychopomp figure who guides souls on the journey through the underworld, their role is not to judge the deceased, but simply to provide safe passage as a mediator between the unconscious and conscious realms. This hybrid creature as it appears in her paintings, indicates a woman taking on a male ego, along with the role of a psychopomp, and for the artist a grappling with a hereditary temperament from her paternal relatives. One can ascertain this is the artist’s tumultuous, but necessary part of themselves in a world full of acrimony, to shield her found family, she is a true Bravo, a protector of the hens and inheritor of the task of archiving her ancestor’s history, an informational psychopomp in control of her own name, and her own fate.