Christian Ruiz Berman

Region: MFA Annual

Website: http://www.cruizberman.com

City / State: Providence, RI

If life is a vast broth of entangled actions, making art is how I chart my way through the soup. Having been removed from my homeland of Mexico at a young age, I became accustomed to localizing my identity at the crossroads of memory, fact, and fiction. My work draws from personal histories of migration and adaptation. I consider my work meditative in that it strives to dissect and understand the components of my experience and my cultural and aesthetic legacy in a way that might give a greater understanding of the whole. While I use symbols, architectures, and snippets of stories that are personal, I want my paintings to embody a shared experience. Part of this experience is the struggle between the homogenizing power of globalization and the innate human desire to assert one’s uniqueness. What is the role of the tribal and artisanal in a society where the click of a button can connect you to the rest of the world, and global media conglomerates dictate the cultural norms of millions?