Ana Roldán
Displacements
Ana Roldán’s series Displacements use images taken from a 1970s exhibition catalog for an exhibition called The Death in Mexico. Using pre-Columbian objects and other artifacts from Mexican history, the exhibition aimed to explore various representations of death in the Mexican cultural tradition. Roldán’s works begin with these rich black-and-white photographs and break them apart into fragments, slicing and dismembering the artifacts they depict. Puzzling the pieces back together in altered ways, Roldán’s resulting images reveal lines of fissure, gaps of black, and dislocations in form. These imperfections in the surface of her reconstituted artifacts relate to the imperfect processes of memory and the fragmented inheritance of knowledge and meaning.