Juanita Berrio Lesmes --International Artist
Juanita Berrio is currently a MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota. She has known since she was a child that she was destined to become an artist. She grew up in Colombia and moved to Italy to attend college. When choosing what subject to study, she was divided between social sciences and art, but ultimately decided art was her calling. As a child, she was taught that an artist was a painter. Berrio studied painting and expanded her artistic practice to include photography, digital media, sculpture, and installation while she was teaching Art History in Colombia. During the 3 years she was teaching, she realized the expansive media possibilities for creating art.
She has since explored collage through combining photographs, fabrics, and paintings. In these compositions, she juxtaposes good and evil, poor and rich, pretty and ugly, pure and impure,… Within these groupings, she is reacting against the categorical division of the world.
Life experience is the most important influence on her work. During college she studied Alchemy, war and postwar (In-formalism). Juanita had a strong desire to understand the effects of such events on art. These interests are linked to the tragic loss of her grandfather at the early age of eight. Berrio’s grandfather (her mother’s father) was murdered. He was a retire General of the Columbian Army and Juanita had deep admiration for him.
This event has had a deep impact on her life and humanity. Working through the difficulty of this situation has helped her narrow her conceptual focus to ideas surrounding healing, reconciliation, time, dialog, and memory. She has strong ideas about how art experiences can aid in rebuilding communities. Berrio is interested in working in domestic environments to see how people work through problems. She feels that these places allow individuals to behavior openly and honestly because of the familiarity.
Through her work, she wants her audience to question how you place yourself in social context, and how you place “others� in the same social context and why. Juanita’s strategy is to draw her audience in through strong aesthetics, which led to uncovering the layers of ideas.
Currently, she is preparing a collage of photographs for an exhibition in Montevideo, Uruguay at the Goethe Institute Gallery. Within each photo is a different scene of toy plastic figurines in varying situations. Berrio feels that the mass-produced characters represent us as a community, as well as, individuals. The photographs set up choreographed interactions, which in some scenes juxtaposing opposites (ex: army soldiers and ballerinas). These toys are cultural icons which relate to history and memory within the frames.
If Juanita could meet any artist (living or passed), she would like to meet Maria Teresa Hincapie. Hincapie was a performance artist who focused on the ideas of ritual and domestic. She had a love and respect of nature.