Victoria Ravelo

She / Her / Hers

I was born in Miami, Florida to Cuban exiles. Growing up as a first-generation American navigating various cultures and subcultures taught me to see the local with the eyes of the foreigner and the foreign with the eyes of the local. My work reconciles this multiplicity of experiences utilizing abstraction to address the ways we (re)interpret and (re)make the world(s) we inhabit. Drawing from personal memory and quotidian materials whose colonial antecedents are often forgotten, I seek to bridge cultural spaces through the force of image, material, and space to make marginalized histories visible. Ultimately, I question the construction of our neo-colonial identities and wish to complicate accepted notions of assimilation and hybridity by teasing apart the various influences that form our present. It is necessary work to bring awareness to the ways we as a people share similar spaces at once. To this end, it is an exercise in empathy; a muscle that is in constant danger of atrophy in a divisive cultural climate.

Artist’s website: www.victoriaravelo.com
For more info please contact info@thechapterhouse.org