Carlos Rosales-Silva

Region: Northeast

Website: http://www.carlosrosalessilva.com

City / State: New York, NY

 My studio is a place for research and meditation on the ever-expanding histories of Brown peoples in the United States. My works consider the histories of the vernacular cultures of the American Southwest, the Western canon of art history, and the political and cultural connections and disparities between them.

I find abstraction to be a useful tool for navigating the tense states that Brownness often finds itself in, states where we attempt to preserve cultural tradition while assimilating for survival purposes. I believe art-making to be an expansive field where visual communication can attempt to untether from contextual spoken or written language. Spoken and written Eurocentric language, as a system of knowledge, has been historically weaponized against Brown communities. While I do believe it is important to adapt to, invoke, and reimagine the weapons of colonization, I also believe in art-making as a way to reconnect with and create innovative methods of non-Western communication untethered from written or spoken language.