Rest Ashore

Rest Ashore, 2020

Locust Projects, Miami FL. 

 September 12 – October 24, 2020

Locust Projects presents Rest Ashore, a large-scale multi-channel video installation by Latinx multidisciplinary artist Juana Valdes. The work reexamines six decades of Cuban migration and its parallels with today’s global refugee crisis, interrogating how such events are mediated in mass culture while honoring those who perished at sea. Rest Ashore marks Valdes’s first major venture into video and a pivotal shift in her artistic process.

The installation builds on Valdes’s longstanding focus on water—sea, ocean, rivers, and “bodies of water”—as central to her reimagining of the Caribbean. Visitors first encounter Waves of Migrations (Olas de Migraciones), a tower of CRT televisions playing archival footage from successive waves of Cuban migration: elite executives in the early 1960s; the orderly departures of 1965–74; the 1980 Mariel flotilla following political prisoner releases; and the perilous raft journeys of the 1990s.

Beyond the screens, an immersive environment in shades of green and blue evokes the ocean’s depths. Two facing video walls present Eternal Sunshine/Dreams of a Foreign Landscape (Eterno Resplandor del Sol/Sueños de un Paisaje Extraño)—a man gazing toward the horizon and an endless ocean sunset. The floor, covered with shipping pallets reconfigured into seating platforms, leads viewers to vast canvas “sails” suspended overhead. On them, Valdes’s new film Rest Ashore (Descansar en la Orilla) projects imagery of objects lost at sea and washed ashore, evoking sacrifice and human loss.

Drawing from the Cuban-American balseros’ experiences and extending to migrations worldwide, Rest Ashore challenges conventional notions of the refugee and how these narratives are archived in media and collective memory.

This exhibition is made possible, in part, with support from Funding Arts Network, Oolite Arts’ 2018 Ellies Creator Award, and University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMASS) 2019 Research Healey Endowment Grant.

1. Waves of Migration (Olas de Migraciones), 2020
   Archival footage and photography on loop
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2. Rest Ashore, 2020
   4K video, 12 min. loop Director/Producer: Juana Valdes
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3. Eternal Sunshine/ (Eterno Resplandor del Sol)
   4K single channel video, 3 monitors 
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4. Dreams of a Foreign Landscape (Sueños de un Paisaje Extranjo)
   4K single channel video, 3 monitors
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Director/Cinematographer: Juana Valdes

© Juana Valdes 2020. All rights reserved.

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