Deconstructing identity
During an interview with Luz Magdaleno Flores for the Chicago Reader, Clotilde Jiménez discusses the personal and cultural questions behind his upcoming exhibition Éramos Silencios at Mariane Ibrahim in Chicago. Returning to the city six years after his last solo exhibition, Jiménez explores his Puerto Rican ancestry alongside his Black American identity and experience living in Mexico through mixed-media collage portraits and sculptures.
The works draw on family secrets and inherited silences, which Jiménez describes as shaping him and those around him: “So the show is really about silence and how that forms us from a young age.” Rather than straightforward family portraits, the figures function as “coded images” built from found imagery and invented characters, inviting viewers to take their time with them.
Jiménez also reflects on how Mexico has complicated and expanded his understanding of identity, describing himself as having moved from a “bifocal” to a “trifocal” perspective encompassing Puerto Rico, Black America, and Mexico. He describes his practice as “almost like a diary,” using art to work through questions without necessarily resolving them, while collage allows him to express different aspects of his fragmented reality simultaneously.
Excerpted words written by Luz Magdaleno Flores for the Chicago Reader.
