‘Portable Worlds’

Portable Worlds

Gallery 106, a space within Flatbed World Headquarters dedicated to showing contemporary Cuban art, is currently presenting black-and-white photography by Eduardo Muñoz Ordoqui. In the artist's series, "Sabina's Letters," part of "Portable Worlds," he has composed images in which video correspondence sent to him by his sister is projected onto everyday objects from the artist's U.S. environment. This is then manipulated by the use of multiple exposures. The effort to create a connection with a distant, beloved person through art results in a series of quiet, poetic images. For example, one untitled picture is of a happy child held by an older man, presumably his father. This loving image is projected onto the side of a stack of books, as if to suggest that their lives are recorded therein. A wistfulness and sense of distance is present throughout the show, and in some photographs, it seems as if the artist feels his immediate surroundings are less real and vital than the images sent to him from afar. An untitled work features a video landscape turned upside down and projected onto a series of file folders. This piece contrasts the freedom of movement in a landscape with bureaucracy. The theme of writing and paperwork is continued in another work, in which blended and fragmented family images are projected onto a partially open spiral notebook. It appears to be a visual pun on letter-writing in the form of video correspondence.