Claudia Peña Salinas & Lumin Wakoa

Present Co. opens the new year with Meridian Atlas, a two-person exhibition featuring sculptures and installations by Claudia Peña Salinas and paintings by Lumin Wakoa. Installed as a series of conversations between the artists, their respective practices move past their own edges in order to find collective associations through intuition, content, and visual data. The result is an unfolding of systems and (counter) narratives that propel the viewer to consider multiple experiences and dimensions simultaneously.

Meridian Atlas implies a strand of meta-mapping－the translation of location, landscape, and travel into existential and experiential concepts. Through the artworks presented, Peña Salinas and Wakoa also show a concern for how human anatomy and physiology can act as kinetic agents. Ultimately, what use is a map, or the landscape itself for that matter, without a mind and body to process the orientation of a location, crossing, or vantage point?

Over the past three years, Peña Salinas has been researching Tlaloc, the Aztec god of rain and fertility, in an ongoing body of work composed of objects, images and installations. As with many mythical deities, Tlaloc embodies a dual nature that alternately elicits reverence and fear from his worshippers. This lord of water, through his beneficence, provides and sustains life itself, while simultaneously controlling the destructive possibilities of hail, lightning and thunder.

Wakoa’s intimate paintings are manifestations of memory processed through time and place. Grounded in the abstracted landscapes of her rural upbringing, her imagery transpires as recollected stories that have morphed and melded into a folkloric topography. At once both specific and ambiguous, the layered depictions and poetics of her work maintains the subjective truth of an oral history, passed between generations.

Claudia Peña Salinas was born in 1975 in Montemorelos, Mexico and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Hunter College in New York. Peña Salinas has exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries, museums, and project spaces such as Curro (Mexico), Embajada (Puerto Rico), El Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (Mexico), as well as Forever & Today, Momenta, Underdonk, Helper, Queens Museum, and El Museo del Barrio－all in New York. Recent residencies and awards include: Lower Manhattan City Council, Process Space (New York), and SOMA (Mexico). She is also a recipient of the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship (2007).

Lumin Wakoa received her BFA from the University of Florida and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Providence College and Reynolds Gallery. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Untitled Art Fair (Miami/Present Co.), Lu Magnus, Classic Six Gallery, Sweatshop Studios, ACNY, and Field Projects, among other venues. She was selected for the 2010/11 VCUarts Fountainhead Arts Fellowship and received an MFA fellowship from the Dedalus Foundation in 2010. She is currently an adjunct professor in the Arts Department at Westchester Community College, as well as at Queensborough and Kingsborough Community Colleges.