Carola Bravo: Blurred Borders

If history tells us anything, it’s that cultures and populations are not static.  Societies shift and populations move, driven by war, poverty or persecution, and pulled by opportunity and hope.  Migration and Immigration are emblematic of the American condition.  African Americans moved from the rural South to more industrial areas of the North in what became known as the Great Migration. Likewise, hundreds of thousands of European immigrants crossed the ocean, often fleeing political or religious persecution in their homelands;thousands throughout Latin America and the Caribbean have journeyed north in search of better lives.  

This theme of change, exile, assimilation and more specifically hope, forms the core of Carola Bravo’s new series of works, which are inspired by Jacob Lawrence's  The Migration Series (1940–41).  In Blurred Borders, Venezuelan-born Bravo, known for her immersive site-specific installations and videos that address space, time and shifting territories, mines her personal history for inspiration. Depictions of migratory birds, yellow butterflies, weathered suitcases and white doves evoke political, psychological, poetic, and pragmatic manifestations of the contemporary migrant experience.