Click to view "Invisible Minds" slideshow

“Invisible Minds” and “Silenced” were two exhibits inspired by my experience working as a volunteer with abandoned children in a public hospital in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. “Invisible Minds” consisted of an installation of a series of color photographs of some of the children I met while working there. “Silenced,” which I created two years after “Invisible Minds,” was an installation of more than a hundred etchings of drawings of children’s skeletons and bones.

"Invisible Minds” was installed for the first time in TJaden gallery at Cornell University, and four years later at The Centro Cultural de España (Spanish Cultural Center) in Santo Domingo. The photographs are intimate portraits that confront the viewer through a personal interaction with the images. The exhibit offered the viewer moments of reflection about his/her own mental state in contrast to those of the children portrayed in the images. Between images, I installed mirrors the same size as the photographs, providing viewers with the experience of seeing their reflections before and after looking at a photograph. With the placement of the mirrors, I intended to make spectators aware of themselves in relation to each image.

These children spent most of their time inside their cribs with people coming by and observing them. With my camera, I became one more observer, another viewer of their reality. I composed most of the photographs leaving the white bars of the child’s crib between him/her and me, thus suggesting imprisonment. I manipulated the color balance of the photographs with a focus on blue tones to emphasize the cold reality of the rooms where the children lived.

This exhibit was an experiment to explore the power as well as the limitations that visual images have in provoking a reaction in the viewer. The installation initiated my interest in the different psychological mechanisms that people use when presented with artwork that is confrontational.

Click to view "Silenced" slideshow

ABUSED, RAPED, MURDERED, FORGOTTEN, VIOLATED, POWERLESS, INJURED, LEFT IN SOLITUDE, BATTERED, ABANDONNED, MALTREATED, DECAPITATED, EXPLOITED, MADE INVISIBLE, DISREGARDED, HELPLESS, OPPRESSED, HARMED, ISOLATED, UNPROTECTED, HUMILIATED, DRIVEN TO SUICIDE, DEPRESSED, CONDEMNED, DESPERATE, UNDIGNIFIED, MUTED, HOPELESS, BEATEN, ASSAULTED, USED, WRETCHED, TRASHED, MOLESTED, MANIPULATED, DISCRIMINATED, DEFENSELESS, SILENCED…

These are words that attempt to describe the lives of millions of children around the world who are victims of violence every day. “Silenced” is a project that emerged from my exploration of different art mediums to voice my concern about the detrimental conditions in which many children live.

“Silenced” was conceived as a multi-sensory installation of more than one hundred etchings printed in translucent sheets of vellum. The images are of children’s skeletons drawn and printed in black ink. The prints were hung in four rows across the gallery space, and visitors could walk around them. On the back wall, at the end of the rows of prints, the viewer was left to witness a series of small prints of children’s body parts depicted as if they were anthropological objects.

The artist Brian Sure, who was my supervisor and critic of the exhibit, wrote the following about the exhibit:

“The installation of 'Silenced' was carefully calculated to engage and transform the viewer. This presentation shifts emphasis from the meticulous care with which each image was skillfully produced to the cumulative effect of these haunting shadows. Using a brush loaded with strong acid, [Alba’s] sensitively rendered skeletons of infants were drawn directly onto the surface of each prepared copper printing plate. The images were drawn and redrawn, proofed, adjusted and re-proofed until each took on a distinctive and convincing persona.

Then, by exploiting the possibility of multiple impressions from the print matrix the delicate beauty of each image is magnified by repetition until the critical mass of silent, simple images explode into an overwhelmingly powerful statement of pathos that cannot be forgotten. Once printed, the sections of translucent sheets of vellum, in some cases too large to be printed in a single run through the press, were taped together to produce the completed images. The skeletons are strung up across the gallery, arranged like rows of hospital cribs in a pauper’s ward, displayed like stained bed-sheets transformed into miraculous multiple shrouds of Turin. You are drawn to make your way to the other end of the room by glimpses between the rows of prints to a group of smaller images hanging on the far wall. Quiet sounds become audible as one adjusts to the unfamiliar light flickering through the hanging prints. The sounds of children, soft and vague, become just clear enough to encourage concentration. The children’s voices mix with the sound of the paper rattling in the current you stir up walking between the prints, and the images, viewed from unfamiliar angles in movement, mix in your mind with the sounds, and together they block out the cares you brought into the room, so that by the time you reach the far wall you are able to fully concentrate on the blood-red, x-ray like images of hands and arms and skulls and unfamiliar bones arranged asymmetrically in a disparate haunting group. Having read Alba’s statement, and the adjectives she has formed into a devastating list, you have become a different person by the time you retrace your steps back through the prints (2001).”

“Silenced” presents a fatalistic view of human nature, a view through which I ultimately attempt to provoke reactions and emotions that are life reaffirming. I wanted this exhibit to offer a commentary on the anonymity of these children. In “Silenced” the human figure becomes a haunting absence, and you can only imagine, by looking at each print, the realities of the child who have ceased to exist.

“Silenced” beautifies suffering and sublimates pain. The delicate quality of the prints contrasts with the crude subject matter. To work on the images of “Silenced,” I went through dissociative-like mental states as a way to detach myself from the subject matter. Perhaps, it is also through intermittent states of dissociation that viewers can cope with the contrasting emotions that “Silenced” evokes.

Each print is a cue for recalling and/or creating a new memory in your mind. It is in this process that I hope to make you actively confront this social reality and not become complacent and detached from it as you leave the gallery space and return to your everyday life.