May 24, 2022

08:05

Bruno Pacheco – Cenarium Magazine

MANAUS – The exhibition Mama Tuyuka, or Mother Earth for the Kokama people, has free admission at Moacir Andrade Gallery, at Sesc Amazonas, in Manaus. The initiative takes place from May 27 to July 29 of this year and brings a series of canvases made by the artist and graffiti artist Chermie Ferreira, who performs a combination of graffiti and plastic arts. The event is curated by Virna Lisi.

“The public will find in the exhibition a new line of work, with new colors and a new palette, which deals with the sky of Manaus: the shade of blue that will be in the works, the red, the orange, the yellow that symbolize a lot our sunset and sunrise, in this tone of orange to pink,” said the graffiti artist.

Despite having a consolidated career outside Amazonas, with works in São Paulo, this is Chermie Ferreira’s first solo exhibition in Manaus, the city where she was born. The artist’s paintings are made of canvas, paper and wood and marked by expressionist traces in graphite and acrylic painting.

“The works that will be in the exhibition are unpublished. No one has ever seen them. They are exclusive, unique works, made for the exhibition. It was one of the first works I did in 2022 and Mama Tuyuka opens the door to my line of work both in color and in this narrative about mothers,” stressed the artist.

Exhibition curator

To CENARIUM MAGAZINE, Virna Lisi told that, unlike other exhibitions in which the artist has a large number of works for the curator to select, Chermie produced this series exclusively for her first solo exhibition.

“The exhibition Mama Tuyuka was based on the concept in which the artist dedicates to her favorite themes: feminine, indigenous, and riverine culture themes, demonstrating the beauty, strength, and wisdom that exist in the women of the North in their daily lives, providing an affective and intimate, yet strong and ancestral series,” Virna Lisi pointed out.

“For her first exhibition, she wanted to represent the indigenous mothers, and these mothers in moments of healing, of food, subsistence, and protection. And she wanted a new color palette especially thought out and planned for this series, and the mixture of paints created incredible textures and depth, that Chermie’s mothers pop off the canvases,” Virna Lisi stressed.

Virna Lisi pointed out that she intends to present the artist’s works with the canvases posed without a chassis or frame for the public’s prestige, with the edges frayed in raw cotton. “This concept carries a strong message of resistance and liberation from the canons of academic art. Being free from frames, from limits and boundaries, has a symbology and has a strong implicit meaning if we further relate it to the context of the artist, as a woman in search of more rights and social empowerment,” stressed the exhibition curator.

“As a social scientist and curator, I worked understanding the anthropological bias of the specific orientations of the artist, who wanted to break out of the conventions. Besides presenting pieces with new textures, the result of the combination of spray paint, I was requested that the canvases were without chassis or frame, the rustic presentation is an expression of the artist herself,” Virna Lisi pointed out.

According to the curator, this simplicity also represents a connection with the ancestral cultures of the original peoples, who fight to keep their territories to live their traditions, their rituals, their ways of life, and their wisdom. “It is a subtle yet complex exhibition,” she comments.