INSTALLATIONS > summer & other dreams

summer & other dreams is a solo show featuring stark and evocative graphite drawings by Angela Maria Azmitia. The white of the paper meets the black velvet of repetitive pencil strokes to portray Azimitia’s memories of Florida. She records the women around her and renders every detail from the hours spent poolside beneath the oppressive summer sun to the flowering of a fern at night. As intimately-scaled drawings, the viewer is pulled into these vignettes of tenderness and at times, ambivalence. In Deep End, a foot stands upon a tiled ground, hovering above the jagged lapping of waves. The pool, even as it is a refuge from the heat, presents another set of obstacles. By contrast, in the individual portraits of women, their eyes fearlessly meet the observer’s gaze. Every portrait carefully attends to the angled arch of a brow and the particularities of each ringlet in her hair. In Baptized, this woman emerges unscathed from the deep end.

Even as the sweltering humidity washes over these scenes with a sense of ennui (such as in Sunburn), life persists. Palm trees flourish, pushing past the frame of the image; they are resilient like the women Azmitia so meticulously portrays. As snow ceaselessly falls outside her window in Chicago, the artist takes to pencil and paper to dream of summer, of another time and place, when she as a teen was dreaming of somewhere else, somewhere outside of Florida. Jean-Luc Nancy writes, “Drawing is the opening of form. This can be thought in two ways: opening in the sense of a beginning, departure, origin, impetus, or sketching out, and opening in the sense of an availability or inherent capacity.” With an emphasis on “essential incompleteness,” summer & other dreams begins with Florida as a point of departure and opens to reveal the recurring resilience and inherent capacity of those who, against all odds, continue to grow.

Her studio practice is also informed by her experience as a leasing director, wherein Azmitia works to promote affordable housing and community resources. As the granddaughter of Guatemalan and Cuban immigrants and white rural farmers, the artist is committed to helping others take root, to perhaps relish the passing warmth of summer and other dreams.

- Jen Chen-su Huang