How does a new neighborhood, or city, or country, or culture become home to us?
To make a new place our home, we must embrace the change, embrace the place, embrace the people, and embrace our new surroundings. We must also be embraced.
Embracing, Lorena Morales’ third solo exhibit with the gallery, and the title of her most recent series of artworks, arose out her experience living as an expat in Angola; specifically, in Soyo, a small town bordering the Congo River. These works contemplate the relationship between color, lines and shapes that appear, and disappear, according to the changing light, and based on the position or angle of the viewer. The dynamic experience points to the relationship between the materiality of the media, and the immateriality of light and shadow; not unlike what it feels like to question the meaning of ‘home’ and ‘culture,’ in an unfolding search for similarity, or what is absent, in new and unfamiliar environments.