From an autobiographical point of view, "RETROPICAL” at Yellow Peril Gallery explores the subaltern identity of a Caribbean native living in New England.

"The visual composites on view are made up of imagery from the places I call home, where one reality is inserted into another using photographs, moving images and drawings," notes Vázquez Rodríguez.  "Tropical scenery cuts into the New England bleakness and the use of color and black and white imagery sets in motion a rhythm that reveals the intermediate spaces that come out of this latitudinal relationship.  This third space is further explored through the invocation of colonial iconography, as well as an investigation into the notion of Otherness as it relates to popular references of the extra-terrestrial."

 In her body of work, Vázquez Rodríguez embraces nostalgia as “a temporal form of mourning that speaks to the cultural displacement symptomatic of years in a self-exiled state of almost constant re-migration,” she shares.  “I hope to create an aesthetic dialogue that challenges a viewer's assumptions and superstitions concerning the tropical self.”

Vázquez Rodríguez  is both an artist and independent curator, since 2010 she has been curator at LA GALERÍA at the Villa Victoria Center for the Arts in Boston's South End. Her work explores sociopolitical issues from an autobiographical perspective, and has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Vázquez Rodríguez studied Painting at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, and Photography and Film at The Massachusetts College of Art and Design.  For more info about Anabel Vázquez Rodríguez, visit anabelvazquez.com.