...Betsabeé Romero! Even though she's just gotten into town, Ms. Romero had time to sit down with me and discuss her work being shown here at Moore.
Romero has been known to use the entire car, but she explained to me that the tires she uses in many of her works evokes feelings of the past while highlights the contradictions of modernity. She believes that as a whole, western culture too highly idealizes speed, so instead she uses the tire to conjure images of the past when cylindrical images were abundant in art. Romero states that the circle has had a long standing role of importance in every ancient culture, especially South American ones such as the Aztecs. As a tool, tires are ideal for printing, and can serve for other purposes aside from speed. Romero uses the tires as a diffusion of ideas between cultures and to focus on the universality of the circle.
It is because of this universality that Romero carves birds from multiple different cultures onto her tires. Not only does she use birds from Mesoamerica, but also those from Chinese and Japanese art as well. She describes these birds as being trapped, first on the tire where they are carved, and then freed through printing, only to be trapped again on paper. Romero says this idea translates loosely into "we always find a new cage."
For Betsabeé Romero, art is a process through which any manner of social commentary can be made. By combining history with modern day industrial and manual labor, Romero is making her own commentary on today's culture forgetting its past.
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