Artist Highlight: Gabriela Gamboa
Photo: Pedro Wazzan/IAMWAZZAN.
Gabriela Gamboa (b. 1956, Pittsburgh, PA) is a Venezuelan-American artist whose work connects her personal history with issues pertaining to displacement, transplantation, exile, and memory. Following a unique encounter with with renowned playwright Eugene Ionesco in Chicago in 1979 after moving back to the US, Gamboa shifted her focus from painting to film, sound, performance, and installation to explore new forms of communication and audience immersion. She has been an artist-in-residence at Bakehouse Art Complex since 2018.
Gamboa received her BFA in Art and Design from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Visual Art from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She has exhibited artwork both regionally and internationally at renowned institutions including Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas, Venezuela; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima, Peru; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Santiago, Chile; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del Zulia, Venezuela. In 2021, she was awarded an Ellies Creator Award by Oolite Arts. She is co-founder of the experimental multimedia ensemble POLYBURO and was a member of the Venezuelan electronic music collective MUSIKAUTOMATIKA, which explored connections between multiple mediums and artistic collaboration as a means to address concerns about social and ecological issues.
On the occasion of her new exhibition, “New Topographies: 25.7617° N, 80.1918 W°” at Bakehouse—a multi-site installation that brings together archives, photography, and found material to explore how particular landscapes relate to and influence memory—we sat down with Gamboa to discuss her artistic practice and how Bakehouse helped her grow roots in Miami.
Installation view: “Gabriela Gamboa: New Topographies, 25.7617° N, 80.1918 W°” at Bakehouse Art Complex. Photo: Diana Espin.
Can you tell us about your artistic practice?
My work is rooted in the performative and the body/territory relationships. I use altered and manipulated film, video, and still photographs, juxtaposing scenarios both past and present that connect my personal history of displacement as a Venezuelan exile to larger issues of global migration and its impact on the environment. I am also deeply connected to language and its use and misuse in communication; I use words and sound both as symbols and as tangible elements to create layers of meaning and interrogation for myself and the viewer.
Tell us about a personal artistic project or body of work that you are currently excited about.
I am currently working on a film and performance project, returning to my older improvisational methods of letting sound and language lead the way toward a visual component. I have been researching other forms of communication that occur in nature—between plants, for instance—to organize my current body of work. I'm also looking deeper into the historical process of territoriality and the meaning of belonging and ownership that is related to the land, the earth. I hope to create an interactive installation with film and sound with this.
Installation view: “Gabriela Gamboa: New Topographies, 25.7617° N, 80.1918 W°” at Bakehouse Art Complex. Photo: Diana Espin.
Tell us about how you have developed as an artist since you began working at Bakehouse.
As I have probably told everyone I know, my studio at the Bakehouse is the whole reason I stayed in Miami. When I applied and was told there was a space available, I didn't even have a home yet and I would have just returned to Venezuela if this opportunity had not opened. But once I saw the facilities (darkroom, printmaking, etc.) and met with colleagues I knew from Caracas, I knew it was a unique opportunity. The exposure and the community of Bakehouse are really priceless. These are not just words: it is a real dynamic environment.