Feria Material 2025

Amy Bravo “Se un Bravo”

Swivel Gallery is pleased to present “Se un Bravo” a solo presentation of Amy Bravo for the 11th Edition of Feria Material. Immediately upon entry, the viewer is confronted by a barrage of six of Bravo’s confronting characters, who feel as if they are stoically in “about face” awaiting instruction from the seminal central sculptural work “” that is poised to lead this battalion of grisly? misfits? into their destiny. Evolving on her “Automatron” series from her dynamic September solo exhibition with the gallery “TransmogrificationNOW!". Her latest works merge cabinets, curios, and furniture with eerie and nostalgic elements such as bones, relics, and a multitude of media offering a unique exploration of Cuban mythology and narrative.

February 6th - February 9th, 2025

MATERIAL Vol. 11, EXPO Reforma, Mexico City

Bravo summons forth a distinct system of characters, themes, and symbols: the essential constituents of the artist’s personal mythos. Seamlessly integrating the artifacts of religious culture, her family’s history, and her own inventions, the imagery brought to the fore in the artist’s compelling set of coming-of-age narratives that have thus far comprised her practice. Their presence holds a steady mixture, a witches brew of long-haired, blank-eyed beings, s, boxers, and medusas that hold space in the manner of deities seemingly entrapped within a looped hero's journey that reflects the artist’s convoluted human experiences. Though their demeanor mimics the stiffness of icons in religious architecture, a mischievous and almost primal aura emanates from them, compelling us to follow along with their losses and victories.

These fictitious entities engage in an endeavor, with their pupil-less eyes, looming silence, yet brimming with ferocity, they encompass intimacy, myth and family history, set somewhere between reconstruction and fiction trying to decrypt the essence of a lost or fragmented ancestral home, while simultaneously sketching the contours of a future brimming with equal parts destiny and danger. They are Bravo’s own imagined avatars, whom the artist describes as female, however they do not correspond to anything definite, neither in terms of gender, species or status. They showcase the evolution of the artist’s journey with a willful vagueness,almost a timeless tale, like the ferryman transporting souls to the underworld, inviting us to immerse ourselves in an ever-expanding cosmos of hybridity and of contagion, of crossroads and lands watched over by spirits, goddesses and the vulnerable.

“Cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two cultures, straddling all three cultures and their value systems” Amy Bravo’s works are daughters of la mestiza, the “new consciousness” described by the Latino American author Gloria Anzaldúa: “la mestiza undergoes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war. I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races. I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that has not only produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings.” As Bravo also states herself, “In my current body of work, I am trying to embrace the inevitability. How can I turn into people I am sometimes so challenged by, so frustrated with, but twist that into my power? What strengths can I gain from them? And how can I use them to fight back?”