Proyectos Punto

Casas and Islas are both spaces where memories are created and morph into culture, each acting as places that embody our personal and collective experiences. Here, homes and islands are a foundational part of the artistic practices of the three artists participating in Proyectos Punto’s inaugural exhibition, Casas + Islas. In this selection of collages, sculpture, and illustration, Edra Soto, Juan Butten, and Santanafirpo XL immerse us in imagery that evokes their personal reflections of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

The title of the exhibition is drawn from the series of digital collages Casas-Islas | Homes-Islands Edra Soto created during the pandemic from archival and recent photographs during a period when Soto was unable to return to her birthplace of Puerto Rico. Soto asks us, “what happens to memory when a person leaves a place, leaves the island?” Each texture in her collage serves as a  modern archaeological record. With a graceful touch, Soto applies textures like a bricklayer, shaping them into casas, each resting on oceans of vibrant hues sourced from the fachadas of homes in San Juan, PR. Each collage is screen printed onto newsprint paper, a material historically used to convey information.

Initiated after Santanafirpo XL (José Santana) immigrated from Santiago de los Caballeros, DR, to East Bay, Boston, the Casitas Dominicanas series consists of watercolors, ink sketches, and digital illustrations. Throughout his work, Santanafirpo XL’s grandmother’s small blue wooden home is set amongst variations of the urban landscape. Casitas emerge from tennis shoes hanging from telephone wires, rise like floating islands in the sky, or crest over the hump of a swimming turtle. For Santanafirpo XL, his sketchbooks and digital artwork embody the memories of his life on the island of the Dominican Republic and reflect his new home in Massachusetts.

“La Isla,” as it is known to the Dominican artist Juan Butten, is both a metaphor of his home country and what he calls his miniature floating barrio. The neighborhood is a collection of actual buildings from the cities of Santiago de los Caballeros and Santo Domingo, DR. Butten fabricates his sculptures from trash collected from the beaches of Montesinos, debris which originates from barrios and later pollutes the ocean and shores of the island. Butten calls our attention to the detrimental effects that plastic, styrofoam, metal, and cardboard have on the inland, coast, and oceanic ecosystems. Tags on the facades weave a deeper thread for Butten, connecting to his origins as a graffiti artist. Signage exhibits his humor and ability to subtly critique the negative societal impacts that places like bancas (lottery ticket houses) have on the lives of young women who are forced to work in them and the people buying the lottery tickets. Butten notes, “they sell false hope in the form of paper tickets, each holding dreams never realized today, but maybe tomorrow…” As artistic structures, each miniature building is scaled at 25:1, yet within each small sculpture Butten is able to highlight the beauty of the urban city while paying homage to its architecture and cultural history while drawing us into the places and spaces that hold his personal memories.

Casas + Islas is an homage to the vibrant cultures of the Caribbean and a reflection of the beauty we live amongst in the El Punto / The Point neighborhood. A beauty that extends from the places we each originate from and into the homes we’ve created here. In subtle, striking ways, Soto, Butten, and XL’s artistic practices ask us to look back on what memory means to each of us and to the communal processes by which memories create belonging and embody the many spaces and places we call home.

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The Casas + Islas exhibition was organized by the Punto Urban Art Museum and was generously funded by the Barr Foundation and the National Endowment of Arts’ Challenge America grant program.