Roxbury artist Rixy’s exhibition “Enter the Cúcala” is on view at Simmons University’s Trustman Gallery, 300 The Fenway, Boston, from April 4 to May 13, 2022.
“This series investigates Rixy’s personal Caribbean Latinidad experiences and explores a world inhabited by her cast of strong, vivacious and daring femme characters,” according to the gallery. “Painted with a variety of media, works in the exhibition seek to liberate Rixy’s characters from Machismento’s toxicity and recontextualize them in an environment of shifting power dynamics. Each femme character and creature, carefully and lovingly rendered in bright, dazzling colors, exudes sensual awareness. Depicted on found materials like packaging cardboard imbued with the sense-memory of previously contained objects, Rixy’s characters take on an additional dimension of meaning, in line with the artist’s emphasis on communal practice and storytelling. Rixy grounds her work with a sense of site-specificity through hand-painted designs on the gallery’s walls, as well as strings, chains, ropes, and braids that act as physical connections between her artwork and the space, bringing her dynamic, colorful world into our reality.”
And what is the translation of the exhibition title? The gallery explains: “Online results will tell you that ‘cúcala’ means ‘wink,’ but actually the term as it is used in this exhibition is a reference to the Spanish slang that Rixy learned from her mother, who would use the word ‘cúcala’ to mean the vagina.”
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