Edra Soto at Rowland Contemporary

Edra's got a show of new work up tonight at Rowland Contemporary. From their site...

Puerto Rican pop cultural references abound in Edra Soto's continuing examination of Iris Chacon, the iconic 1970's Puerto Rican television star. The Chacon-Soto Show: Featuring 'The Greatest Companions' examines the role of the once immensely popular Chacon, whose highly sexual personae, provocative dancing and amateurish singing combined to become a high-camp Las Vegas-style revue, complete with backup male dancers.

Soto captures Chacon's celebrated role through a series of gouache paintings, reappropriated plastic toys, and simplified stage sets designed to emulate the campy styling of her television show. The paintings capture Chacon as she was on stage, outlandish and bawdy, and always with her dancers. Here the dancers are rendered with gorilla-like masks or even as gorillas which are meant to diminish the abhorrent male archetype to secondary status. In some instances Soto replaces Chacon herself, a doppelganger of sorts, in an attempt to assume the role of the Latina in popular media and the seemingly endless need for self-overexposure. One can only ask, just who is the beauty and who is the beast?

I really loved this painting she had up at the Co-Prosperity Sphere earlier this year....



I really enjoy the varied work she produces. She had a huge installation several years ago at POLVO Gallery composed of hundreds of large milagros she'd made out of tin featuring contemporary objects instead of the traditional hearts or other body parts that milagros usually represent.

November 7 - December 13, 2008
Opening Reception: Friday, November 7, 2008, 6-9pm
Gallery Hours: Friday - Saturday, 11a.m - 5 p.m. or by appointment
Rowland Contemporary
1118 W Fulton Market
Chicago, IL