Lorna Otero’s “Live Workshop: Family Portraits” at MAC, Puerto Rico

The curator of the project, Laura Bravo, explains: “The project is not limited to the medium of photography, but also includes installations and performance. Through a call to the general public to submit a family portrait to the museum, Otero has copied a great deal of images that she has used to start creating a situ and a continuous installation with portraits hanging in the form of a family tree”.

As part of the live work, the artist will also carry out two photography sessions in front of the visitors, with actors or models dressed up to invocate the style and narrative of well-known masterpieces in the history of painting. Both the creation of the installation and the photography sessions will serve Otero as a way to study the visual heritage of rooted traditions in painting- which is also close to the artificiality of theater-, and the models that advertising imposes subtly on its consumers, and the influence of both factors in the structure of the genre of family portraits.

A third component of “Family Portraits” will be a book that will always be present in the project room, in which the public will be able to leave a family portrait and personal history in order to create a collective photo album with the images and stories. This book will be a twist to the comment books which are usually included in exhibitions. The metaphor of the album as an articulate compilation of the particular history of a single family seeks to, on one hand, stimulate the reflection on how the family itself has elaborated its story thanks to the popularization of pictures with cameras that are faster every day, and on the other, pretends to promote the social analysis of the concept of the family in our times.

Lorna Otero’s work focuses on the iconic, the symbolic, and the meaning of customs associated with femeninity, with maternity and the female caregiver as a construct, and with the family and its decadence in Puerto Rican society. In her emerging career there have been many noteworthy events: “Colectiva Serie Regional Proyecto #2, Las Armas Secretas: Dinero, Deseo Arte y Publicidad” en el Museo del Arsenal de la Marina Española, (2010); “On Being Human: Love, Faith, Shame and Hope” at PICTURE Cultural Art of California State University (2011) and the VII and VIII International Biennal of photography at the Museo de las Américas (2010, 2012). In 2011 she obtained third place in the photography contest of the Art Gallery of the Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, and her piece is part of the permanent collection of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico.

The Living Workshop program was established by the MAC with the purpose of projecting the institution as a vital center for emerging art. Having the notorious characteristic of contemporary art of emphasizing in the processes of conceptualization, factored and displayed in pieces and interventions, the vital center must be, above all, a workshop where artists can elaborate their own work, giving the public access to this dimension of art, and in this way consolidating its education of the contemporary. The invitation made by the MAC to curators that develop projects of emerging art meets this objective and is conductive to direct contact between artists and the visiting public.

“Family Portaits” will be exhibited in April, 2013.

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MAC | Museo Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico

www.museocontemporaneopr.org