Juan Gomez
KEEPERS OF AFFLICTION   
Sep 27 – Oct 9, 2021

Juan Gomez’s Keepers of Affliction marks the artist’s ongoing project to visualize the physical and emotional wounds that are inflicted on migrant families, as well as the generational traumas that are also brought to bear upon their descendants. By surfacing, however abstractly, the suffering and loss that comes with geographic and cultural displacement, Gomez hopes to also present art itself as a powerful curative and artmaking, therefore, as an act of redemption and healing. As is often the case in the immigrant experience, personal suffering can too easily be accepted as just a part of the process, forcing the scars of trauma into a suppressed state, only to have them return as further forms of trauma down the line. Both catharsis and cure, Keepers of Affliction presents this repressed suffering as material manifestations of memory, complete with ‘injuries’ made from cotton rounds that are covered with illustrations of scarified keloidal tissue. In doing so, it recognizes that discomfort is a natural reaction to displacement and the embrace of such feelings, rather than their outright rejection, can actually operate as a collective salve, leading ultimately to healthier forms of adaptation and cultural evolution across generations. An exhibition of remembrance, devastation, and emancipation, the installation unites a series of fifteen of these abstract memory objects, each representing the artist’s own immigrant family’s experience of migration (and epigenetic transmigration). Individually, each object holds within it a lineage of struggle, sacrifice, and prosperity. Together, they present a pattern that bonds each to the other, a decentralized network that gives voice to the voiceless and, ideally, heals the very wounds that have been laid bare.

Juan Gomez is a Santa Ana and Long Beach-based mixed-media artist. His work has been exhibited in solo shows at Greenly Art Space and Magoski Art Colony and in group exhibitions at Flatline Gallery, Flux Art Space, SoLA Contemporary, the Huntington Beach Art Center, Irvine Fine Arts Center, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, and the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art. He holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing from Cal State Fullerton. 

WINDOW DRESSING is an annual cycle of short-term installations in the window vitrine on the exterior of the Fine Arts Building. Individual installations run for two weeks only.

Due to Covid restrictions, during the Fall semester the Cerritos College Art Gallery's Main Gallery will be closed, however, the Window Dressing installations can be viewed safely from outside in the open air (all visitors must remain masked and maintain proper social distance).