Bradbury Art Museum in Jonesboro, AR
September 12 - November 20, 2024
Chantal Lesley's work centers around the self-portrait, but it expands upon the genre conceptually, suggesting that perhaps self is more than the individual and the self-portrait is more than the artist before the camera. Her family is frequently included in her work, and she explores her identity through her siblings. Objects and locations are photographed as well, a telephone or a chain link fence-these having a different significance to a child of immigrants.
Lesley considers the ways her location, family, and cultural displacement have affected her sense of self. Culture is an enormous influencer in this investigation. Her immigrant parents came from not only different countries, but different continents. Additionally, growing up so close to the US-Mexico border, the artist was caught in the cultural divide between these two countries as well. The border town where she grew up has a predominantly Latinx population, with the majority of these being Mexican in origin. Even among so many other Hispanic and Latinx Americans, as a half-Peruvian and half-German woman, Chantal Lesley has felt perpetually out of place: "stretched between four cultures."
The dichotomy between personal and shared experiences is a common thread through all the work in this exhibition, which combines three different bodies of work by Lesley. Her blended history of European, American, and Latin-American cultures is not the experience of every immigrant, but the feeling of cultural placelessness goes beyond her unique ethnic background.
Madeline McMahan,
Assistant Director and Curator
Events
Artist/Curator Discussion
Tuesday, November 19, 2024
201 Olympic Dr, Jonesboro, AR 72401
