Mariana Ramos Ortiz: Contra viento y marea

Central Contemporary Arts, Providence RI

October 8 - December 8, 2022

Curated by Melaine Ferdinand-King & Natalie Cohen

Contra viento y marea, a solo exhibition by artist Mariana Ramos Ortiz (she/they), is a critical reflection on and (re-)making of the Puerto-Rican landscape and its personal histories that U.S. colonial narratives have overwritten.

Through sand sculpture, screenprints, and video installation, Ramos Ortiz proposes that history and resistance live in unexpected places. Interrupting an imposing U.S. public imaginary in which Puerto Rico is little more than an idyllic playground, this exhibition attends to beaches and shores as landscapes of memory–early witnesses to occupation. Meditating on lines of flight, Ramos Ortiz leans into interstitial spaces to visually retell history.

Ramos Ortiz builds a world in metamorphosis, a space on the threshold of one state to the next, where the boundaries between memory and future, permanence and transience, become entangled and, perhaps, obliterated. This exhibition proposes Ramos Ortiz’s vision of Puerto Rican futurity: their transgressive structures persist contra viento y marea–against wind and tide.