Oscar Rene Cornejo, Bandereta, 2018. Kumbuk lumber plinth, steel, Ukiyo-e on rice paper, poplar wood, naturally dyed cotton. Courtesy of the artist. A Night's Embrace/ Farewell to be Greeted/Exposed by Dawn, 2018. Lumber/obsidian anchor, Shoji screen, steel threshold, ceniza, sliver of Shoji screen, sliver of fresco. Courtesy of the artist.
Oscar Rene Cornejo, Bandereta, 2018. Kumbuk lumber plinth, steel, Ukiyo-e on rice paper, poplar wood, naturally dyed cotton. Courtesy of the artist. A Night's Embrace/ Farewell to be Greeted/Exposed by Dawn, 2018. Lumber/obsidian anchor, Shoji screen, steel threshold, ceniza, sliver of Shoji screen, sliver of fresco. Courtesy of the artist.
Oscar Rene Cornejo, Bandereta, 2018. Kumbuk lumber plinth, steel, Ukiyo-e on rice paper, poplar wood, naturally dyed cotton. Courtesy of the artist. A Night's Embrace/ Farewell to be Greeted/Exposed by Dawn, 2018. Lumber/obsidian anchor, Shoji screen, steel threshold, ceniza, sliver of Shoji screen, sliver of fresco. Courtesy of the artist.
Oscar Rene Cornejo, Bandereta, 2018. Kumbuk lumber plinth, steel, Ukiyo-e on rice paper, poplar wood, naturally dyed cotton. Courtesy of the artist. A Night's Embrace/ Farewell to be Greeted/Exposed by Dawn, 2018. Lumber/obsidian anchor, Shoji screen, steel threshold, ceniza, sliver of Shoji screen, sliver of fresco. Courtesy of the artist.
Oscar Rene Cornejo, Bandereta, 2018. Kumbuk lumber plinth, steel, Ukiyo-e on rice paper, poplar wood, naturally dyed cotton. Courtesy of the artist. A Night's Embrace/ Farewell to be Greeted/Exposed by Dawn, 2018. Lumber/obsidian anchor, Shoji screen, steel threshold, ceniza, sliver of Shoji screen, sliver of fresco. Courtesy of the artist.
Oscar Rene Cornejo, Insurgently Sympathizing Peasant, 2018. Egg yolk with lime, poplar wood, purple heart, graphite on rice paper, scoria. Courtesy of the artist. Installed in the 1939 section of the Queens Museum’s World’s Fair Visible Storage.
Oscar Cornejo, Peace Through Understanding, 2018. Poplar wood, cypress wood, oil, coal, pigment on rice paper, naturally dyed cotton, twine, indigo, scoria.Courtesy of the artist. Installed in the 1964 section of the Queens Museum’s World’s Fair Visible Storage.
Oscar Cornejo, Peace Through Understanding, 2018. Poplar wood, cypress wood, oil, coal, pigment on rice paper, naturally dyed cotton, twine, indigo, scoria.Courtesy of the artist. Installed in the 1964 section of the Queens Museum’s World’s Fair Visible Storage.
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| Informed by experiences in my own life, I seek to engage more universal themes around displacement and resilience. In my work, the objects and their material composition are metaphors enacting the tensions between forced uprootedness and the human capacity to respond to trauma with resilience. The objects themselves serve a dual purpose, sometimes evoking violence and other times acting as a talisman; Like the machete which is alternately an agricultural tool and a weapon, the objects I create exist in a state of ambiguity. | |||
| I am interested in activating the potential of the material by touching and transforming it through skinning, burning, painting, or sanding. The rituals of the studio leave behind a patina – a trace of lived experience, material evidence of contact with time and events that have passed. I embrace the poetics of form and material as a means toward reconciling the trauma caused by the systematic violence that the Salvadoran state inflicted on its own people. Fresco, Japanese joinery, Ukiyo-e block printing and naturally dyed fabrics embody the importance of the handmade and its relationship to personal agency. Through my process, these mediums become abstractions that syncretize excavated materials and images while they are simultaneously imbued with cultural and historical cues. For example, the flocking of charcoal meditates on the lingering effects of scorched-earth policies that normalized and contextualized the contemporary gang violence in El Salvador. Crushed glass mixed with charcoal refers to the inhumane practice of clandestinely 'poisoning' dogs by feeding them food tainted with crushed glass which if swallowed, induces a slow death by internal bleeding. | |
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| As a first generation Salvadoran American, I found my voice in printmaking. I understood the historical importance of printmaking to spread information and practiced a return to its original purpose as a way to socratically re-visit the history of the Salvadoran Civil war. It was my way of coming to terms with the dissonance I felt in the historical memory of my family and the Salvadoran community. As an artist who organized and directed an artist residency in a post-conflict zone for seven years, I was interested in contextualizing memory and truth as an integral step towards reconciliation within the Salvadoran community. My experiences of advocating for the importance of cultural over economic development in El Salvador has led to an emphasis on process, meditation, and construction in my studio. I invite the viewer to slow down and deconstruct abstractions as an experience. | |||
| As many immigrants flee the blowback of conflict, their experiences enter a polarized discourse that mutates and erases their history. Still in conversation with memory and history, I am invested in opening up the discourse to reveal the overlapping ambiguities of what it means to be an immigrant, a refugee, and/or an exile. In doing so, I hope to broaden narratives of the Central American diaspora as a resilient response to anti-immigrant sentiment within the United States today. I aim to give depth to nuance and speak to the undefined volume of invisible narratives that are present in our everyday lives. Within this framework, I'm interested in a sophisticated relationship to abstraction that is simultaneously involved in questions of the archive, the affective register, and the ways in which we bear pain. My work engages a spectrum of questions oscillating between historical and individual memory and survival, moderated through touch and knowledge of the body. | |
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| prev | Oscar Rene Cornejo (b. 1982, Houston, TX) earned an MFA from Yale School of Art (2011), a BFA from the Cooper Union (2005), and was a recipient of the J. William Fulbright Scholarship for research in El Salvador. In 2004, he co-founded the Latin American Community Art Project (LA CAPacidad), where for seven years he directed summer artist residencies to promote intercultural awareness through community art education. His work has been included in numerous exhibitions at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (2017), Deborah Colton Gallery, Houston, TX (2015), and Diverseworks, Houston, TX (2015). Cornejo has completed residencies at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in 2016, and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where he has been a member of the staff since 2015. He is based in Woodside, Queens. | next | |
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