Cecilia Paredes: The Two Twilights

Ruiz-Healy Art is pleased to present Cecilia Paredes: The Two Twilights. The exhibition opens on Thursday, April 1, 2021, and will be on view until June 5, 2021. This is the fourth solo show of Cecilia Paredes with Ruiz-Healy Art but the first at our New York City gallery. An exhibition catalogue with an essay by Elizabeth Ferrer will be available.

Paredes’s photo performance works often center around the concept of home and relocation, stemming from her move to the United States from Costa Rica in 2004. The Two Twilights draws further inspiration from the periods of quarantine and isolation experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

During the initial lockdown of Spring of 2020, Paredes experimented with using found materials, beginning with an old piece of linen and a pair of curtains. From this experimentation was bom the inspiration for her tapestries, made from discarded and intentionally aged materials. The Two Twilights features three of these tapestries made from silk and cotton on felt. These woven tapestries display themes of destruction and rebuilding. As an artist whose main inspiration comes from traveling and an interest in other cultures, this is a shift from her classic photo performance pieces and a labor of love born out of the pandemic.

The style of these tapestries is juxtaposed in The Two Twilights with five large-format photo performance works in which she camouflages her body behind intricate textile backgrounds, working together to create a visual language of its own. In “Of Wings and Thorns” Paredes states, “the wings represent escaping, and getting out of what we are currently experiencing and the thorns are a metaphor for the difficult situation that we are living in. I am centered in the middle of the photo, under a bird’s eye view, surrounded by birds and thorns.” Magnolia Stories touches on the idea of the unreachable paradise, and the need to create your own paradise. Cecilia shares, “The hands in this photo intertwine, almost like a vine, reflects the idea of vanitas. These works show a beautiful banquet and garden, with people enjoying themselves, yet always contain a motif depicting death. This serves as a reminder that we are just passing." The inspiration of these works is rooted in the literature of epic poetry but displays themes that translate well to the modern-day and effortlessly transport viewers around the world, without leaving one’s home.

About the Artist

Born in Lima, Peru, Cecilia often disguises herself against flora. The sweeping lines of foliage along with the rich hues that paint the backdrop and the artist’s body put her in an intimate conversation with nature. Animals, various objects, and fabric also play a part in the complex layers of Cecilia’s oeuvre. In her photographs, she is so immersed in her surroundings that we can hardly tell where her body begins and ends.

Her studies of Fine Arts were at the Catholic University of Lima and Cambridge Arts in the UK. In 1998 she was awarded The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency Program. Paredes lived and worked in Costa Rica from 1998 to 2004, and represented the country at the 51st Venice Biennial in 2005. She now lives and works in Philadelphia, and travels extensively.  Paredes is the recipient of the 2014 International Award for Artistic Excellence at the Pingyao International Festival of Photography. She has exhibited widely in North, South, and Central America, Asia, Australia, and Europe with solo exhibitions at major institutions including the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia, and the Costa Rica Museum of Art, among others. Her work is in numerous collections, such as the Museo del Barrio, NY; San Antonio Museum of Art, TX; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Panama.

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