Flores para el Trueque, 2017
No Lugar: Arte Contemporáneo and La Huerta y La Maquina, Quito, Ecuador
In 2010, the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs awarded me a Cultural Exchange International Grant. The funding enabled me to spend two months in Bogotá as the artist-in-residence at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. While in Bogotá, I exhibited Wanton, 2011, at Galería Sextante. I crafted an overwrought ultra-baroque floral aesthetic in the imagery and video to question predominantly women laborers' working conditions in the global Colombian floriculture industry. I returned to this subject in 2013, when Mercadito & Mentidero invited me to develop Flores Para El Trueque, where I worked as a flower laborer during the Sunday Bogotá market. In 2017, I furthered the narrative of Flores Para El Trueque in collaboration with No Lugar – Arte Contemporáneo and the environmental arts activist organization La Huerta y La Maquina in Quito. The exhibition included 11 archival photographic intervention prints interpolating imagery from historic California and Ecuadorian flower farms to portray an imaginary place. I documented stories told by retired farmers in California and one with narratives shared by floriculture laborers who currently work in Cayambe, Ecuador.
Cayambe Floriculture Worker Interviews from Jennifer Vanderpool on Vimeo.
