They're cutting the leading edge of contemporary art in Belize and now the artists' collective at the Image Factory is looking to Central America for inspiration. Last month, the factory featured Guatemalan Artist Yasmin Haj and tonight 6 Honduran artists are showing. The show entitled "cross over" features compelling works by young Honduran University Students. Director of the Image Factory Yasser Musa explains the pieces.
Yasser Musa, Image Factory
"We have 6 different art works in the gallery. In the first place we have a video by Allan Mairena who does a video called "The Real of the Possible." This video is a kind of fragmentation of his society in Honduras. The second piece in the other gallery is by Celest Ponce an artist who makes these windows that she calls Bvendita. Again she is talking about identity and how, especially, young people are being overtaken by all this bombardment of commercial culture. "
"Gabriel Galeano is an artist who makes these balls in the gallery and covers the balls with phone book directory paper. There is a lot of names on these papers. Again he is talking about free trade and globalization and how everybody is obscured because he paints the balls where you can't really see the names anymore and there are the many balls of names that are totally- that you cannot see. So it's like all these people being anonymous."
"One of the more kind of funny yet very serious piece in the show is this piece called "Snoopy Land" where the artist builds a high mound. And it's beautifully created in terms of flowers and things like that and Snoopy is right on top and a light is shining right on snoopy and there are these little viewfinders that you get at a circus and when you look through it you see urban life and the decay of urban life. He is talking about the city and how in urban life people are just living in absolute chaos and squalor and poverty yet we are thought through television how a dog like Snoopy is living in a very nice comfortable setting."
"The other two pieces are by Adan Sevilla who is the leader of the group. He has made an installation called hunger factory where he joins these cigar boxes but he imposes the words- hunger factory on them and paints a black fork. What he is saying is that while we enjoy cigars an exportable product from Honduras the people who are enjoying these cigars- very few people think about the labour that goes into the cigars. Finally Cesar Manzanares makes these interesting looking objects that combine clay sculptures of faces and body parts like the hand with these projections like funnels. It's kind of like a penetration into self. Like examining self."
The show opens tonight at the Image Factory and it runs until March 1.
You can find more about the Image Factory at http://www.imagefactory.org