Cecilia Paredes: Walking In My Galaxy Blue: New York City

Ruiz-Healy Art is pleased to present Cecilia Paredes : Walking In My Galaxy Blue on view at our New York City gallery from September 21, 2023 to November 3, 2023. This will be the fourth solo exhibition for Peruvian born, Philadelphia based, artist Cecilia Paredes at Ruiz-Healy Art. Walking In My Galaxy Blue will include a fully illustrated catalogue accompanied by an essay by art historian Emily Alesandrini. Walking in My Galaxy Blue  presents a new collection of work exploring embodied relationships to the cosmos, celestial mythologies, and earthly vegetation. 

"In her photo performance, Walking in my Galaxy Blue, we see a two-legged figure stepping forward in a sky blue and gray patterned setting, the body again echoing the pattern of the surrounding realm in a process of camouflage or transformation. The work, which lends its name for this exhibition, perhaps visualizes the seabed flora of an andean lagoon, microscopic creatures airborne amid an unpolluted sky, or a fossilized interplanetary ecosystem from a far-away world. In 2022, a massive oil tanker spill resulted in the discharge of 10,000 barrels of crude oil into the pacific ocean just north of Lima, tarring twenty five beaches and three protected marine reserves. The pollution proved devastating to the tens of thousands of birds, mammals, and fish that comprise the area’s rich marine ecosystem, not to mention the thousands of fishermen who look to the sea for their economic security. Animals exposed to this amount of crude oil often die from asphyxiation, hypothermia, starvation, or eventual poisoning. In the face of such ecological disasters, Paredes's figure in Walking in my Galaxy Blue, urges her viewers to move forward, perhaps with a momentum to recalibrate our global priorities of environmental stewardship, reciprocity, and mutual survival." - Emily Alesandrini

"At the beginning, all my interpretations of painting myself as surroundings were completely erratic. I was standing there doing nothing, just standing there. But as years passed and I became more familiar with my search and I became part of the landscape, I started moving and then you have images where I am imitating the landscape doing this with my hands and putting my hands in my face because I felt more comfortable. This is now my space." Cecilia Paredes

Paredes pursued her Fine Arts studies at the Catholic University of Lima and Cambridge Arts in the UK. In 1998, she was awarded The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency Program. She lived and worked in Costa Rica from 1998 to 2004 and represented the country at the 51st Venice Biennial in 2005. Cecilia Paredes received the 2014 International Award for Artistic Excellence at the Pingyao International Festival of Photography. She has exhibited widely in North, South, and Central America, Asia, Australia, and Europe with solo exhibitions at major institutions, including the Tabacalera Space, Madrid, Spain, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia, and the Costa Rica Museum of Art. Her work is in numerous collections, such as the Museo del Barrio, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH); San Antonio Museum of Art, TX; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Panama.