REFUGE

Migration yields sacrifice, ongoing pain, grief for things lost. It severs deep emotional connections to family, community, and landscape. Whether forced by war or famine, or undertaken voluntarily for political freedoms, economic opportunity, or familial bonds; the reasons for leaving one country for another are intrinsically layered.

This exhibition examines the relationship between place, displacement, and the idea of home – an emotional and physical attachment to a point on the map, defined by borders, history, and the land itself. In this place, essential understandings are formed: safety and fear, comfort and pain, family and estrangement, culture and community.

For migrants, it is possible to gain, but often to lose, a sense of agency and identity. As Hannah Arendt famously noted, the “right to have rights” is not always a given. As climate change, civil unrest, pandemic, and a precarious global economic system threaten life in the 21st Century, people’s search for shelter on all levels becomes more present and urgent.

These three artists approach the subject from diverse perspectives. Jules Joseph’s work filters folklore of the Caribbean through graphic and painterly abstraction to create a personal iconography that is both intimate and surreal. Sandy Rodriguez looks directly at the emotional, human cost of political and economic policies through portraiture, landscape, botanical research, and a deep connection to the land itself. Gyun Hur takes a lyrical approach. Her performative installations, rich with color and symbolism, grieve for a place that has been lost and reflect intricacies of family relationships and history.