JAVIER SILVA MEINEL
(1949)

Javier Silva Meinel started working as a photographer in 1973. He was one of the founding members of Secuencia Fotogaleria and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1990 for his work about Andean ritual practices featured in El Libro de los Encantados (1993). More recently he published the book, Acho, altar de arena (1993), about the bullfighting backstage of Lima. He is currently preparing a third book which will include the images in this exhibition taken at the Qollor-Ritti pilgrimage in the Cuzco highlands. His work has sought to parallel in images the mysterious beliefs of the Andean peoples. He has had solo shows in Secuencia Fotogaleria in Lima, Centro Cultural de la Municipalidad de Mira flores, as well as group shows all over the world. His work is part of the collection of the Texas Humanities Resource Center in Austin and is represented in New York by Throckmorton Fine Art. Mr. Silva lives and works as a photographer in Lima.

FLOR GARDUNO
Born México City, México, 1957.

Flor Garduño studied at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Mˇxico City. In 1979 she became an assistant to Manuel Alvarez Bravo. Between 1981 and 1982 she traveled with a team of photographers organized by Mariana Yampolsky. The team photographed rural villages throughout México for reading primers published by the Secretariat of Education for Indigenous Communities. This experience as well as her association with Kati Horn influenced Garduño's photographs, which are usually of country locales and towns depicted in a strange and mysterious of surrealism in Mexican photography. Garduño had her first one-person exhibition in 1982 at the Galeria Josˇ Clemente Orozco in Mˇxico City. In 1985 a compendium of six years of her work was published entitled "Magia del Juego Eterno" and in 1987 another book entitled "Bestiarium" was published. In 1986 she participated in the first photographic exhibition of the Sal—n de la Pl‡stica Mexicana and in the inauguration of the Kahlo-Coronel Gallery in Mˇxico City. In 1986 and 1988 she was included in several traveling exhibitions "Reserved for Export" and "Realidades Mágicas" that were seen in the United States and Europe. 1996 Image and Memory, Latin american Photography, 1880-1992 Itinerary: El Museo del Barrio, New York. Aet Gallery of the University of Scranton, PA. Lowe Art Museum, Florida. Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico. Crocker Art Museum, CA. Meadows Museum, Tx. Akron Art Museum, OH. Her one-person shows were in Paris in 1986, the Museum Volkenkunde de Rotterdam in 1989, the Field Museum of Chicago in 1990 and Montreal in 1991. Since 1989 she has dedicated herself to photographing the images that appear in her one-person exhibition and monograph, "Witnesses of Time". The exhibition started at the Americas Society in 1993 and will be traveling across the country to the Museum of Photographic Arts in California as well as various other venues. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Biblioteque Nationale, Paris; and Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporáneo, Mˇxico.



ALBERT V. CHONG


Born in Kingston, Jamaica on November 20th. 1958 of African and Chinese ancestry. Albert Chong is the last of nine children of merchant parents. He left Jamaica in 1977 to permanently reside in the United States and attended the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1978 - 1981 graduating with honors.

Chong's exhibiting career started in 1981, and in that year his son Ayinde was born. He has a daughter as well, Chinwe born in 1987 and he is married to Frances Charteris also an artist. Chong taught at the School of Visual Arts, in New York from 1986-1988, and at Mira Costa College in Oceanside California from 1989-91. In 1988 Chong, Charteris and family moved to San Diego, where he attended the University of California, San Diego. In l991 he was awarded the Master of Fine Arts degree from UCSD, and in that year as well he accepted a faculty appointment in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Albert Chong's photographs are in included collections both public and private, national and international. The three main bodies of his photographic work include the I-Trait series The Still life's and the Thrones for the Ancestors. Other aspects of his work include mixed media sculptural Installations, book works and fabricated to be photographed objects.

His works have been widely exhibited nationally and Internationally. Recent venues exhibiting his work include the Ansel Adams Center for photography in San Francisco, Africas: The First Johannesburg Biennial, South Africa. The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Havana Biennial in Cuba, and most recently included in a group show at IRADAC at CUNY.

He is the recipient of several artist fellowships, including a 1994 CO Visions Recognition award from the Colorado Council on the Arts, a regional National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Photography, and a 1992 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in photography. His work is represented by Porter Randall Gallery in La Jolla, California, Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago and Carla Stellweg Latin American & Contemporary Art Gallery in New York and Chelsea Galleries in Jamaica. Chong's work has been the subject of numerous essays articles and reviews in daily publications such as the New York and LA Times and in art periodicals and books. He Is currently listed in Who Is Who In American Art, and Who Is Who In America. A book of his photographs has been published by the Friends of Photography in San Francisco and is titled Ancestral Dialogues: The Photographs of Albert Chong.



MARTA MARIA PEREZ BRAVO


Marta was born in Havana, Cubain 1959 where she lived until1995, when she moved with her husband and twin daughters to Mexico. She was educated at the San Alejandro Academy of Art and the Superior Institute of Art in Havana, finishing her studies in 1984. After several years of formal training, Marta began using photography as a means of producing personal and often intimate images illustrating rituals and mythological beliefs.

Pérez creates images by using her own body as vehicle through which several themes are symbolically expressed. The photographs are not necessarily self-portraits; she acts out rituals by transforming herself into a living altar. her body, manipulated or fragmented in different poses and depicted with metaphoric objects, floats in the center of a white background. The elimination of any references to time or space emphasizes the spiritual and mystical qualities of the photographs. Her imagery revolves around Cuba's syncretic culture, the Cuban exile, and rituals that are rooted in the Afro-Cuban Religion. Themes of maternity and mother-earth are also evident in her work. The titles of her works, often the names of deities, serve as poetic descriptions of the black and white images which border between the real and the mythological.



JUAN CARLOS ALOM

Juan Carlos Alom was born in Cuba in 1964. He studied photography at the Semiotica del entorna Cubano, Institute of International Journalism, in Havana. In 1985 Alom started working as a photojournalist for the Cuban Press. In 1989 he started experimenting with the photographic medium while studying photo restoration and conservation with the photographer Gerado Suter, at the Fototeca de Cuba. This experimentation led Alom to create a body of work that marks his personal style. Alom's photographs have been visibly manipulated by his hand and are recognizable for their dark backgrounds which act as metaphors for the mythical themes of his images.

El Libro Obscuro , his most recent series, is an iconographic discourse of the personal and cultural history of Cuba. The connotative elements of the photographs are marked by three parallel and complementary structures: that of myth, the aesthetic sign, and socio-historic references. The natural objects depicted are fragmented symbols floating between the natural world and the mythological realm. The artist presents his ethical and existential search for human value within the superstitious and ritualistic subject matter of the Cuban culture.