Bezazian Branch hosts a Hispanic Heritage Month art exhibit featuring the work of local artist Juan Giraldo.
Giraldo's exhibit Blue & Blue will be on display from September 1 through October 31.
Artist Statement
I have spent most of my life in the shadow of New York City, in the midst of the declining industry and long forgotten silk mills of the Riverside section of Paterson, New Jersey. My photographs explore the lives of a people; their experiences closely mirroring my own. I was born in Manizales, Colombia and raised in Riverside, after my parents, brother and I moved there in 1981. Paterson is a working-class city, similar to other working-class cities where my subjects live. I moved to Chicago in 2012 and began to photograph the Great Lakes Reload (GLR) on Chicago’s far Southeast Side. GLR is a 385,000-square-foot warehouse that transports, stores and processes various types of steel products: sheet, plate, bar, beam and tube products.
Over time, GLR came to feel eerily familiar. The smell of diesel and cigarettes reminds me of the loading dock I worked on in my youth; GLR’s dock workers share qualities with so many of my family members, former co-workers and friends. Familiarizing myself with their personal anecdotes and experiences allowed me to embrace the details, beauty and drama of the mundane, which unfolded as I continued to photograph them. A strong bond emerged, which allowed me to photograph my subjects as I would my family. The evidence by the decor of these homes reveals their residents as people of Catholic faith, first-generation immigrants and blue-collar manual laborers. In their stories I see echoes of my past. Intimate spaces reveal the textures of a working life; a Gatorade bottle as a vase uncovers the beauty in the banality of domesticity. My portraits and still-life photographs highlight objects of importance and their iconographic meaning in these settings, reflecting a reverence for my personal history and the lives of the people I photograph.
Hispanic Heritage Month Art Exhibits
More than 20 local artists are exhibiting at CPL during Hispanic Heritage Month.
