MEDICINA DE AMOR
Gerardo Dexter Ciprian
The Bronx Museum of the Arts
on view July 13 - August 21, 2022
Medicina de Amor (Love Medicine) is a solo exhibition of recent work by Gerardo Dexter Ciprian. Working with archival material, hand-me-down objects, oral histories and folklore, Ciprian unearths the ephemera of the Dominican diaspora and broader immigrant imaginary as a source of wisdom, mystery and resilience.
At once personal and allegorical, the exhibition draws on a vast wealth of personal stories, riddles, and superstitions the artist has archived over the years as well as objects and images with special significance in the Dominican immigrant imaginary. Jabon de cuaba—an iconic soap in D.R. used for everything from washing your body to cleaning dishes—is reconstituted into ghost doubles of bricks from the artist’s Bronx childhood home; hand-me-down furniture passed down from the artist’s grandparents is transformed into lanterns that seem to magically light themselves, a reference to the prevalent blackouts in the Caribbean nation. The works are never circumscribed to any one time and place, and often play on a tension between opacity and legibility—a proxy for the indeterminacy of the shifting ground beneath migration and the inevitable fading of intergenerational memory.
Medicina de Amor borrows its title from one of the most recognizable bachatas from the Dominican Republic by Raulin Rodriguez. Like Biggie’s Juicy to any Brooklynite, Rodriguez’s Medicina de Amor serves as a kind of anthem to all Dominicans everywhere. For Ciprian, their work and practice—part archive and remembrance, part mourning and reconciliation—is akin to medicine that mends the ruptures of migration.