BRATTLEBORO-The exhibition “Magos de la Tierra (Magicians of the Land)” brings together works of artists Orlando Estrada and Jacoub Reyes that explore displacement, identity, and the lasting effects of colonialism. The exhibition is on view at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC), 10 Vernon St., through Nov. 1.
In sculpture, assemblage, painting, and printmaking, Estrada and Reyes transform organic, synthetic, and reclaimed materials into hybrid forms and imagined landscapes.
Curated by David Rios Ferreira, “Magos de la Tierra” takes its title from the 1989 exhibition “Magiciens de la Terre” at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, which featured “equal numbers of ‘Western’ and ‘Non-Western’ artists, challenging art-world hierarchies of the time,” wrote exhibit promoters in a news release.
For the show at BMAC, Estrada and Reyes say, they translated the title from French into Spanish as a gesture of their own cultural reclamation. By highlighting a Spanish-speaking territory — in this case, Puerto Rico, a former Spanish colony — the artists emphasize their own lived experiences.
Estrada and Reyes’s artworks “examine the internal experience of otherness. They explore questions of place and belonging and how these forces affect identity — revealing deep connections between land, survival, and the formation of the self,” said organizers.
Estrada creates sculptural landscapes from discarded cardboard, polyurethane foam, coconut fiber, 3D-printed elements, found objects, and organic materials.
Bringing together digital and handmade processes, his sculptures combine materials to create environments that “exist somewhere between geological formations, imagined ecosystems, and mythology,” said organizers. Estrada says his work explores the experience of living between cultures, places, and identities, while considering the relationship between humans, nature, technology, and time.
Reyes transforms woodblocks traditionally used for printmaking into large-scale sculptural works, carving botanical and figurative forms into the wood and reclaiming the printing matrices as finished artworks.
Reyes also creates large-scale prints on fabric, transferring ink using found glass, wooden spoons, and his palm, and sometimes incorporating local flora and earth pigments into the inks. His works reflect his interest in the body as a landscape, connecting personal and family histories with questions of identity, place, and renewal.
“Together, Estrada and Reyes blur the boundaries between the natural and [the] manufactured, the personal and historical, and the familiar and imagined,” said curator Rios Ferreira in a news release. “Their work feels especially relevant now, as the lines between the real and constructed, inherited and invented become increasingly blurred.”
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This Arts item was submitted to The Commons.