AMBRILLA

"Carolina Jimenez is a Dominican-American visual artist from New York City whose practice utilizes photography and installation to build bridges across time and space. She is interested in the continual shaping and reshaping of memory; how do we choose what to carry with us and what to let go? How can we retrieve what has been erased?

In this piece, she draws on the universality of ironwork to highlight the tension between what has survived materially (the structures themselves) and what has been intentionally obscured. The sankofa (an aphorism from the Akan people often translated as ‘it is not shameful to return to the past’) is utilized to highlight the contributions of enslaved Ghanaian artisans and ironworkers whose designs were stolen and mass produced without recognition. The photograph, a meditation on a personal childhood memory, includes an unseen iron gate bearing the sankofa. The work examines how emotion, nostalgia and history embed themselves in vernacular objects and everyday scenes, inviting viewers to consider art-making as shadow work that can uncover repressed aspects of both the personal and collective psyche."