Rafael Abreu-Canedo: BIO
Born 1984, Brasil.
In 1994, my family immigrated to the US: where school teachers talked in a mysterious language. Not understanding them, I scribbled school-days away. As I began to learn English, haha... By then, too late: I had already mastered grafitti bubble-letters, and my caricatures were beginning to compel me. In my confusion, art found me instead.
As evidenced by the "ART" section of this website, my body of work shifts across many different mediums. However, I seldom begin an art project exclusively from a "medium" or "material" stand-point. Instead, the material form of my artworks emerge from a seemingly ready-made rhizome/palimpsest of personal/collective memories and mythologies, the residues of which are fossilized into materials and practices. In doing so, I follow in the wake of artists who, particularly since the seventies, have questioned the formalism of established languages, renewed an awareness of art's political role--in a broad sense--and had their actions pervade the social space. Artists such as Bruce Nauman, Teching Hsieh, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Lygia Clark, Cildo Meireles, Francis Alys, and Santiago Sierra come to mind.
Whether inviting people to an event where everyone is hearing each other's actual heartbeats, simultaneously and in real-time as they socialize, or projecting high-speed video close-ups of participants' faces as they transition from straight-faced to ticklish chaos, my role as an artist is to organize systems and parameters that create intimate and visceral encounters between viewers and the unexpected, the hidden, the distant and/or the invisible. In some way, giving "voice" or "body" to the invisible ubiquitous--which is always present, simultaneously, permeably and non-hiearchically, as if floating on the silent thoughts around us.
Through an open-ended approach to art, I explore issues of language, behavior and identity, with focus on systems, the body and space. I've exhibited and taught throughout the US, since 2001, at the age of 16. Since then, I have worked with organizations such as Creative Capital, PFPCA, Franklin Furnace, Queens Museum of Art (New New Yorkers), Sprout Fund, Root Division, Oakland Unified School District, New York Department of Education, and Pittsburgh Public Schools, developing a commitment to communication through the arts; changing the future by working for a better today.
