Néstor Armando Gil/Taller Workshop: RASTROS (lo que se hace al andar) November 1 - December 8, 2023

Lecture and Reception

Tuesday, November 14, 5:30pm, Lenfest Center's Keller Theater

About The Exhibition

When you make a meal do you see the way your skin becomes the skin of what you are peeling? Your father's hand around the peeler at the end of your wrist. Your madre's eyes attempting to locate clarity through a scratched pair of glasses. The wrinkles in your knuckles like grooves in the carrots at the end of Abuelita's palms. I weep for the smell of cigarette smoke on blue mechanic's coveralls. I long for the song of the thread in a sewing machine making play clothes out of old bedding. I will find La Virgen circling a tent revival next door to a car club meeting in a reptile farm parking lot.

Una oración por Mendieta, otra por Machado, y la última por todos nosotros, que sigamos cómo siempre: de espaldas hacia las mañanas, ojos abiertos, enfocados, entrenados en los ayeres.

RASTROS (lo que se hace al andar) is an exhibition of traces. The images, forms, materials, actions at work in the art-making of Néstor Armando Gil/Taller Workshop are remains of a childhood spent in an immigrating family in the deep south. Gil traces tobacco from its iconic status as symbol of both revolution and embargo; through ritual uses and the cigarettes his father smoked; to register and recollect as sepia stains in paper. He builds transmitters: a kite he learned from his father who learned it from his father, a grandfather who international politics prevented Gil from ever having met. He makes translators: his mother's and grandmother's dichos etched into and through tobacco leaf, onto tobacco-stained paper, folded into maps. He becomes El Panadero, walking cities in a misguided search for his mother. In gold leaf and in butterfly bodies, in fishing tackle and piñatas, in rubber stripped from truck innertubes, Gil conjures the transient, the migratory, the maritime: that plane above which we breathe and beneath which we do not. Néstor's work peels nostalgia's skin back, carves out its fleshy interiors, and makes room for critical remembering.

Néstor Armando Gil nació en La Florida, E.U. en 1971. Cursó estudios superiores en la Universidad de Carolina del Norte En Chapel Hill obteniendo una Maestría en Artes Plásticas en el Año 2009. Sus obras han sido exhibidas tanto en Los Estados Unidos como en el extranjero. Néstor Armando Gil has lived in Florida, North Carolina, Maine, and most recently Pennsylvania, where he teaches studio art at Lafayette College in Easton. Taller Workshop is the rotating collective of maker-collaborators with whom Nestor ideates, processes, and produces work.

Visit the artist's website: https://www.nestorarmandogilprojects.com