TLRQVALL! (TIENDE LA ROPA QUE VA A LLOVER!)
Governor’s Island Art Fair 2018
September 1–30, 2018
It was summer some years ago when, across the courtyard from my studio window, I caught a glance of an elderly woman hanging clothes and sheets over her windowsill. I took out my phone and recorded the different fabrics being carried by the wind. It brought to mind images of Abuela in Dominican Republic hanging out sheets to dry in the backyard, and I could remember her saying “tiende la ropa que va a llover,” (“hang the clothes before it rains”). As an image, seeing it now in New York City, it seemed to collapse the time and distance travelled from the so called “third world” to the “first world”.
Around the same time I started collecting different hand-me-down artifacts donated to a second-hand shop around the corner from my studio. Similarly, the image of hand-me-down objects seemed to capture for me a quintessential immigrant ethic of make-do resourcefulness. These images come together in Tiende La Ropa Que Va a Llover as vehicles to contemplate the shared experiences of immigrant diasporic communities and how these experiences inform relationships to place, objects and home.