Jacqueline Brito and Yamilys Brito are exhibiting together at the Cuban Art Space in New York for the first time since 2003. Their exhibit, “Natural Causes” (Causas Naturales)  runs through October 20. The show includes work from three series by Jacqueline, and four series by Yamilys. Jacqueline, 36, is a painter whose works in this show are oil on canvas with mixed media. Yamilys, 35, uses woodcuts, digital prints and lithographs to make her singular works.

The sisters chose the title of their latest exhibit because “We are looking at the nature of the outside world as a way of looking inside ourselves as human beings, at creation, at emotions”. Though looking at both human nature and the physical world from different angles, all of the works function as a kind of “existential inventory, where the human body, flowers, the landscape, the world that surrounds us, all serve as tools with which we write our universe. What happens naturally in life is the motivation for these pieces.”

 Jacqueline’s spectacular “Ikebana” installation consists of 40 small mixed media works on canvas. The term “ikebana” means “lane of living flowers,” an ancestral Japanese technique of flower arrangement but also a philosophy of nature, where flowers go beyond mere decoration to become significantly associated with emotional behavior. Here the image and the materials are brought together to make the content of each work function in an autonomous way inside the series. Each flower distinguishes itself individually: there is the flower and there is the emotional meaning with which it is associated in popular culture. For example, the jonquil is associated with desire, the black rose with pain, the chrysanthemum with consolation, the lily of the valley with humility, the daisy with patience, and so on. Jacqueline uses bits and pieces of hair, fiber, glass, metal, ceramic and many other materials to bless each work with its natural being and its emotional force.

Another series represented in the show is one called “Mirages” (Espejismo), where the motivating force is the fact of Cuban migration. In this series “an incredible real fact turns to metaphor. The leit motif of the pieces are the old American Chevys, adapted with sails to cross the sea between Havana and Miami, which become a small navy thanks to the everyday genius of the would be emigrants.” The works are, like the Ikebana series, mixed media on canvas and in the case of “Mirages,” the Chevys are made out of glass “to show the fragility of a dream, the American Dream that one imagines drawn on these surreal floating vessels.”

Three larger paintngs are from Jacqueline’s “Talisman” series; each is oil on canvas with a resin figure attached to it.

Yamilys Brito’s four series are “Sewing the World” (Cosiendo el mundo), “A Better World is Possible” (Un mundo mejor es posible), “Calories” (Calorias) and “Crossing the Sky” (Cruzando el cielo).

 “Sewing the World” uses prints and early 20th century promotional postcards from the Singer Sewing Machine Company. Yamilys says that she uses “the act of sewing, mending, as a metaphor for putting together solutions to the world’s problems, solutions to a world that is spoiling, losing its natural balance.”

In the series “Crossing the Sky” planes are transformed into symbols of each culture, represented through old tourist photographs. The irony and sense of humor show both the cracks in each culture and the inability of observers, blinded by tourism publicity, to see what is real and enduring in each culture.

 “A Better World is Possible” looks at science and religion, and the intertwining of the two. While science’s search of other worlds (and the works are populated by the aliens we know and love from television and movies) opens utopian possibilities–even the chance to solve worldly problems seemingly without solution, it doesn’t stop the advance of religion: the image of the postcard used in each work is that of a mother and daughter praying for a better future.

 “Calories” is a hilarious series: the works talk of our obsession with food and eating disorders. If the other series border on the spiritual side of phenomena, this series sticks to the physical. All of the disorders – anorexia, obesity, bulimia, cannibalism, hunger, malnutrition and the unequal distribution of food – are treated humorously and/or ironically in these prints that use postcards of well-fed children. The postcards are old promotional lithographs of milk for children.

Jacqueline (b. Jan. 1973) and Yamilys (b. Jan. 1972) have been doing their art since childhood. Both graduated from the San Alejandro Art Academy in 1991 and from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana in 1996, and both now teach at ISA. Yamilys is considered one of the foremost printmakers in Cuba and Jacqueline one of the country’s most evocative painters.

For further information:
212.242.0559 or slevinson@cubanartspace.net