FRACTURED LANDSCAPES:
Cara Despain and Emanuel Tovar
Sat., March 6 - Sun., May 16, 2021
The Art and Culture Center / Hollywood is pleased to present Fractured Landscapes with Cara Despain and Emanuel Tovar. The exhibition reveals work by two individual artists, Utah/Miami-based Despain and Guadalajara-based Tovar, that use similar methods to create formal and performative work that carry diverse meanings and themes. Despain and Tovar both approach a variety of actions such as fire, video, and photography using materials including rock, carbon, sand, and literature to articulate the fragile beauty of their natural environments. Fractured Landscapes is supported by a grant from Funding Arts Broward.
Cara Despain is an artist working in film and video, sculpture, photography, and installation addressing the social and political issues of the American west. Despain identifies the problematics of land use, territories and ownership, and climate change, in order to visualize the current age. Her site-specific work is heavily involved in research and working directly in the field, often using environmental objects as source materials and mediums in her process. Despain’s work in the exhibition will stem from her recent expeditions through desert mountain climates and her residencies at Mana Contemporary, Miami, and Anderson Ranch, Colorado, where she experimented with 3D rendering and aluminum casting and created painted casts of rocks and fossils for a pop-up rock shop in downtown Miami.
Emanuel Tovar is a multi-media artist who creates site-specific installations with sculpture, video, and painting. Using both natural and recycled materials, Tovar illustrates the fragile state of art, politics and social structures, addressing the conflicts and vulnerabilities of the human condition. For this exhibition, Tovar will create a site-specific installation using natural materials such as coal that will be activated by performance. The performance, usually executed by a single person, reflects on human labor and cracking social systems in an effort to encourage a constructive dialogue.
Cara Despain was born in Salt Lake City, Utah (1983), and currently lives and works in Miami and Utah. She holds a BFA from the University of Utah (2006). Despain has a solo exhibition on view at the Southern Utah Museum of Art. She is also completing a newly commissioned site-specific work for Art in Public Places: Art of the Underline. Additional exhibitions include: it doesn’t look like paradise anymore at Southern Oregon University; Cryin’ Out Loud at the Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe; Slow Burn at Spinello Projects, Miami; and No Man's Land at Rubell Family Collection, Miami. In 2014, she was the Art Director for the feature-length film The Strongest Man that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival (2015), as well as A Name Without a Place which premiered at the Miami International Film Festival (2019). Awards include the Ellie's Award from Oolite Arts (2018) and the Salt Lake City Mayor's Award in the visual arts (2012). Despain was also selected for the South Florida Consortium Fellowship in 2016.
Emanuel Tovar (1975) lives and works in Guadalajara, Mexico. Tovar has had solo exhibitions at Casa Pedregal, Mexico City; the Museo de las Artes, Arena México, Guadalajara; and Museo Raúl Anguiano (MURA), Guadalajara. He participated in the 14th Edition of the Performance Art Festival Verbo in Sau Paolo in 2018. Additional group exhibitions include: “El día es azul el silencio es verde la vida es amarilla” at Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City; “A Poet*hical Wager” at MOCA Cleveland, Ohio; The Mistake Room (with Gabinete GHE), Los Angeles; The Balmoral, Los Angeles; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City; and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid.
Facebook Live Artist Talk: Cara Despain
Fractured Landscapes is supported by a grant from Funding Arts Broward.
The Art and Culture Center/Hollywood is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization supported in part by its members, admissions, private entities, the City of Hollywood; the Broward County Board of County Commissioners as recommended by the Broward Cultural Council; the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs, the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; the David and Francie Horvitz Family Foundation; and the Josephine S. Leiser Foundation. We welcome donations from all members of the community who wish to support our work.