Bienvenidos a Gauatemala! by Jason Crigler
on view October 18 - November 30, 2008 in the 2nd floor gallery. Opening Reception Saturday, November 1st, 7:00p.m. with a talk by the artist.
“The stories of the people here are far more complex than these photographs can depict, but my hope is that in some small way, these images will provoke people to think about issues like where their coffee comes from, or how their daily habits affect our global neighbors.” - Jason Crigler
Dense forests and the Spanish language, aquamarine walls and smiling faces.
This past summer, lived and worked in rural Guatemala with his wife and six friends. The goals of the trip were to install two water purification systems and meet community leaders of coffee cooperatives in order to establish a more direct and just system of trade between the coffee farmers and coffee buyers in Louisville.
Photography was a secondary concern on the trip, so Jason decided to be very selective about what he photographed. This series of photographs are driven by the people he met on the coffee farms and in the small towns where they stayed – people with names like Dorotea, Papa Tereso, Don Julio, Felix, and Candglaria. Then, the photographs without people act as lessons in the colors and textures of the landscape.
Certainly, rural Guatemala is a poor country. It was only in 1996 that the civil war ended, after stressing the countryside with violence for nearly 40 years. Some of the photos here , made in 2008, give no indication of hardship. Mamita’s colorful smile invites us as a postcard might, but other photos witness the difficulties faced in this still-recovering region. The photograph of Maria and her grandchildren contrasts her difficult aging with the potential of an easier life for the kids. The cartoon Bart Simpson shows up twice within these eighteen photographs, alluding to North America’s primary contribution to developing Central America – modern entertainment.
Jason has called the people pictured here our “global neighbors.” It’s difficult to think of these people in this way. In a world of more than six billion people, is it even possible to develop compassion for individuals so far removed from our daily experience? While the world increasingly becomes more and more globalized and interdependent, we must. These photographs ask that we remember the world is full of people and that our daily actions do in fact affect people and landscapes all over the world.
That Jason and his friends would sacrifice a summer of easy living in Louisville, KY to help get clean water and fair coffee trade for a small group of people in the mountains of Guatemala is an example of the kind of global compassion that is needed all across the interdependent world in which we live.
-Michael Winters
