Edison Peñafiel
“Land Escape is a study of movement, migration. The travelers are caught in a mirage, discombobulated by uprooting, by boundaries, by the passage without fixed ends. The absurdity of the conditions recreates the earth as an absurd landscape made out of projected video, chiffon fabric, and barbed wire that breaks through the confines of flat image to invade the shared space, to define a border between the viewer and the work.
Edison Peñafiel, Land Escape, 2019. Video. Courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani. (Still image - video no longer available after exhibition dates)
“The travelers wear animal and human masks, highlighting humanity’s inborn instinct to move, resettle, search, and—it is hoped—find. But in a world of violently enforced borders, this most natural of drives breaks across strange new lines, never quite locking back into place. What the migrants in Land Escape experience is a breakdown of the natural order. While the space is transformed, time is also. Their journey always leads to the beginning, and their transit leaves no trace. There is no footprint to mark progress, only the looping of their video universe, the eternal return of the human in migration.
“It is only when these characters stop for a moment that one can glimpse, in the brief panting of their pause, the human under the mask. These are not just tricks of light but people living in human bodies. Old bodies bent by age, young bodies in pigtails—all bodies that must move, cannot stop for long. And in their pausing, they must contemplate. And in that contemplation, understand the unending nature of their path.”
— Edison Peñafiel
Artist Edison Peñafiel.
About Edison Peñafiel
(Ecuador, 1985)
He lives and works in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.
Edison Peñafiel is an interdisciplinary artist who manipulates drawing, sculpture, photography, and video in order to decontextualize, and then reconstruct absurd realities that question abuse of power, prejudice, exploitation, and social issues that persevere through time. His work seeks to create empathy by highlighting narratives of the oppressed—narratives that question the assumptions of our society. Peñafiel has presented his work in numerous large-scale projects, site-specific installations, and immersive installations, appearing at the Bass Museum (Miami, FL), Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Orlando Museum of Art, Elsewhere Museum (Greensboro, NC), Atlantic Center for the Arts (New Smyrna Beach, FL), and the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale. Notable awards include: the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art, and the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship.
Artist website: edisonpenafiel.com
Gallery website: sabrinaamrani.com
Artist Instagram: @eddypenafiel