Alonso Art

presenting Jose Iraola and Tomas Esson From Dec 2nd through Dec 30th, 2006Alonso Art presents an exhibition that includes two photography projects: Memoria Televisiva by Jose Iraola and The Water Tank vs The Empire State Building by Tomas Esson. The Cubans Jose Iraola and Tomás Essonare are best known as painters. They were trained mainly as painters and exhibited largely as such throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s. However, in recent years they started using photography on a regular basis. Jose Iraola’s two most recent shows, “Fotofija”(2004) and “Facts and Fiction”(2005), were dedicated solely to photography. Tomás Esson is exhibiting photography for the first time in his career. He dedicated seven full years of his life to the photography project that is the subject of this exhibition. In his Portraits featured in Memoria Televisiva, as in the previous works of his “Fiction” series, Iraola’s images are usurpations of a television show’s violence and sensationalism. His images are non-accusatory, anti-heroic statements that go beyond stereotypes to redress the politics of personal growth and social struggle in the dominant Latin-American discourse. The project by Tomas Esson departs from a daily documentation done by the artsit on the best view he could see from the windows of his studio in NYC. It is a visual diary of seven years of the artist’s life and captures the zeitgeist of an ever changing skyline that has come to symbolize America’s strength as a nation, but that usually overshadows the individual drama lurking beneath. For more information, please call: 305.576.4142