Daniel Barragán, American Flag, 2018, Hand sewn flag, acrylic, flag pole, flag mount., 72 x 9 x 36 inches.
Please join us for an artist talk with alumni Daniel Barragán and artist Edward Salas on November 9, at 6pm in the NARS Project Space.
Daniel Barragán will discuss his exhibition Undermining in conversation with Edward Salas.
In his first solo show Undermining at NARS Foundation, Daniel Barragán exhibits paintings, sculptures and artifacts that concern the detection of cultural wealth and cultural mobility. Like an excavator, Barragán imagines a historic site where markers are used to extract visual artifacts from their original resting place. When these images are unearthed their history’s become skewed and they inherit new names and identities. Barragán is committed to the detection and description of the shape of time. He transposes, reduces, composes, and colors a facsimile that will evoke recognition all while conveying a new perception of the subject. Barragáns' work raises questions of cultural representation, cultural assimilation, ownership, economy and survivance -- the survival and resistance of a particular subculture.
Daniel Barragán was born and raised in the American Southwest along the Juarez, Mexico border. A true binational geography that is dense with indigenous, Mexican and American history. These histories are synonymous with travel, trade and movement. The physical, infrastructural, and institutional conditions of movement - the available routes; the maps; the vehicles; the relative speed; the controls and costs; the limits on what can be transported; the authorizations required; the inns, relay stations and transfer points; the travel facilitators - are all serious objects of analysis in Barragáns work.
Barragán was born in 1988 in El Paso, TX, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has exhibited in group shows throughout the United States, most recently at Greenwich House Pottery, NY (2022) and Barranguets Arts in Easton CT (2022). Barragán was a Smack Mellon - Hot Pick (2020) and was the recipient of the Stutzman Family Foundation Fellowship (2019). He received a BFA (2013) and an MFA (2019) from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.
Edward Salas (b. 1990) is a working artist from Queens, NY. Along with being a studio artist he has worked as an arts educator at organizations like Creative Art Works, The Museum of the Moving Image, The Whitney Museum and El Museo Del Barrio focusing on programming for teens, communities of color and people with disabilities. Salas had exhibitions such as ‘The Jester Plays Dead’ at Selena’s Mountain (Ridgewood, NY), ‘Breakfast in America’ at Studio Schloss Jagerhof (Dusseldorf, Germany) ‘This Country’ at Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT), ‘Neither Here Nor There’ at the Manny Cantor Center (NY, NY), ‘El Museo Extemporáneo de Arte Popular’ at BWSMX in (CDMX), ‘Esurient Eyes’ at Regina Rex Gallery (NY, NY) and ‘American Fine Arts’ a traveling exhibition organized by BBQLA. Salas was an artist in residence at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning in Queens, NY in 2016. He received his MFA in Painting from the Alfred-Düsseldorf Painting program at Alfred University in 2020 and BFA from State University at New Paltz in 2013.