January 24 – March 30, 2013

Riverside-based artist Pável Acevedo was the recipient of the Honorable Mention Award from the Riverside Art Museum’s 2012 Members’ Exhibition. In an effort to further spotlight RAM’s vibrant artist-member constituency, all award winners from the past year’s exhibition will be featured in small solo exhibitions throughout the museum or at its partnering satellite venue at the Walter’s Mercedes-Benz showroom.

The following text is by Alejandro Cristobal (Puebla, Mexico, 2013)

and translated by Evangelina Mirande.

Migration as a Traveling Creative Spirit

Historically, the process of human migration has been a means for social, cultural, commercial, gastronomic, religious, and racial transformations, to mention a few.

How can immigration be studied from a creative point of view? It can be re-defined by an artist. The acculturation of his/her reflective sketches and constant adaptations in a different context can bridge to new forms, creations, and designs. The artist changes, redefines, evolves, his/her style enriched through the appropriation of mediums.

In the case of Pável Acevedo (born in Oaxaca, 1984), it appears that the creative spirit and mediums have traveled with him and have become lodged in new forms. If we look at his recent work, we see an evolution from a morbid aesthetic to the current exhibition of drawings of friends, acquaintances, brothers, children, spouse, parents, and grandparents. Immigration has facilitated longing and memory that assumes creative weight in his new aesthetic.

Pável “immigrates” or imports the faces of prior works in Oaxaca and remolds, resurfaces, and replaces them with new faces, loves, and voices. He generates changes that migration has made across the course of history.

Pável merges his own “canción mixteca” or song of the Mixteca with California through works that do not abandon the grotesque or sensate violence such as Memories, Distance, Longing, “Oaxaca, I Never Forget You.” Through each photographic sketch that Pável creates, his native Oaxaca is never forgotten.

Oaxacalifornia exists in the spirit of every immigrant. Whether by force or through pleasure it reshapes memories from afar and is reinterpreted through each individual’s own nostalgia.