Main Art Gallery reopens with exhibition of M.F.A. student

OCTOBER 29, 2020 — UTSA’s Main Art Gallery is hosting its first exhibition—since the pandemic caused campus closures in the spring—with the work of master of fine arts candidate and multimedia artist Susie Lopera. The exhibit, Roots and Feathers, open through November 7, allows the university and the community an opportunity to experience art firsthand inside a gallery space once again.

Attendees can view Lopera’s sculptures, stop animation and other videos that aim to let viewers escape from the everyday. Through her surreal juxtapositions, Lopera explores poetic metaphor in which two things are reduced to one.

“To me, the focus on the finite is about more than an escape into memories,” said Lopera. It allows me to experience a sense of transcendence as I think about being part of the larger universal flow of time and cause and effect.”

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“Lopera takes her viewers beyond the safe borders of the familiar and out of our usual coordinates.”

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Roots and Feathers offers recurring motifs, including birds (usually owls), feet and human faces. Lopera uses these symbols with very specific purposes. For example, feet and shoes represent being grounded and metaphorical footprints of experience. Birds and wings signify upward movement, aspirations and dreams.

In diverse media that often brings together representational human and animal imagery, Lopera reminds her viewers that our daily activities and expectations live alongside memories, mysteries and fantasies.

“Lopera takes her viewers beyond the safe borders of the familiar and out of our usual coordinates with our feet on the ground to encourage us all to take wing and explore other dimensions of thought and imagination,” said Scott Sherer, professor of art and director of the UTSA Main Art Gallery. 

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Born in Medellin, Colombia, and migrating during childhood to the U.S., this Latina artist specifically chooses materials for their ability to convey meaning. For example, clay facilitates the creation of stylized objects that underscores some of the humor in life. While the medium of video allows her to manipulate the dimensions of space and time through stop-motion animation. In this process, Lopera also plays with story structure and linear and nonlinear narratives, to create a world with its own rules separate from reality. When the work is combined, she shows how our minds can reconstruct a memory.

— Milady Nazir

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