The OAS AMA | Art Museum of the Americas and the Permanent Mission of Peru to the OAS announce the opening of “Amazogramas,” an exhibition of the Peruvian artist’s large-scale photo-based installations, curated by Alejandro Castellote. Just over two years ago, he began a project that took him to Bahuaha Sonene, a national park in the Amazon jungle at southeastern Peru. Throughout the first year, Huarcaya made several trips in which he found it impossible to "depict" the vast web of emotions that the Peruvian jungle inspired. To solve the dilemmas he faced, Huarcaya chose to discard the sophisticated cameras he had used on his initial journeys. Instead, he chose to go back 175 years, and recover one of the first procedures used in photography: the photogram. The photogram is a technique that, without a lens or a camera, allowed for accurate reproductions of objects. Huarcaya’s solution to the difficulties of representation that paralyzed him was admitting the landscape´s superiority: to stop being an author – a monolithic authority – and become a mediator.

The expedition undertaken by Huarcaya probably had his own interior search as a destination; and it was that relationship between experience and introspection that gave him access to different and more effective solutions. In any process that we use to obtain answers, time is a galvanizing and protean element. A beautiful metaphor of that process is found in photographic paper, which slowly shows its latent image – it reveals its answer – within a developer’s container. The examples, metaphors and allegories provide us with images that help us to understand the world in its most minuscule or anecdotic dimensions, as well as its metaphysical ones.

ON VIEW
November 15, 2018 – January 27, 2019, admission free

HOURS
Tuesday-Sunday 10AM-5PM

LOCATION
Organization of American States Secretariat for Hemispheric Affairs AMA | Art Museum of the Americas 201 18th Street NW Washington, DC 20006