3 Oct 2011 | 3,127 views
“Miami-based interdisciplinary artist, Charo Oquet’s works in multiple mediums, including metal, wood, textile, ceramic, photography, installation, video and performance. Her works include a broad spectrum of diverse sources ranging from Christian and Afro-Caribbean religion iconography, Russian Constructivism, folklore, trash culture, Surrealism and carnival.
Her approach features and integrated and participatory process often carried out in collaboration with a close network of assistants, friends and family. The trivial and the subcultures are relevant to Oquet’s work as are the multifaceted layers that are the result of our human experiences, the daily impact, the “materiality of lived times”. Touching on issues of memory, the formation of personal and communal identity, infrastructure, culture, and the layering and compression of time, space, and place. Oquet’s sculptures are conditioned by their interrelationship with their surrounding. Often these gravity-defying, messy exuberance constructions she builds struggle to soar beyond the boundaries of the spaces that contain them, appearing to stagger in the brink of collapse. Distinctly anti-Minimalist in its sensibility, they are not in search of the “hand-made”. While she plays with the properties of each of the material, she subverts its ordinary use. She used fabrics, beads, dolls, fragments of manmade, mostly synthetic materials, exploring how matter takes on value, both temporally and spatially while allowing chaotic forces and the complex behavior of urban life to shape her work.”