Click below to hear the visual description for Kevin Quiles Bonilla’s Carryover (Blue Tarp in Vega Alta):
Below is the visual description text for Kevin Quiles Bonilla’s Carryover (Blue Tarp in Vega Alta) :
My name is Kevin Quiles Bonilla, and my work featured in the exhibition INDISPOSABLE: Tactics for Care and Mourning is titled Carryover, parenthesis Blue tarp in Vega Alta, from 2019. It is a chromogenic print in a waxed wood frame. Its dimensions are forty-one inches high, sixty-one inches wide, and two and one quarter inches deep. The artwork depicts an individual standing on a green field in the town of Vega Alta, Puerto Rico. They are situated in the middle of the image at an angle and they are covered in a blue tarp, only exposing their right hand which has a multicolor bracelet, and their legs. They are wearing a white shirt, blue jeans and they’re barefoot. Around them are different kinds of vegetation, particularly three plantain trees of different sizes, closely surrounding the individual, which were planted in the location by my father.
In the photographic series Carryover which began in 2018, I engage with a blue tarp, which became an iconographic symbol in a Puerto Rico post-hurricane María. These tarps were given by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to people who had significant damage on their homes following the hurricane. What meant to be a short lived solution became a long term reality, which revealed the inadequate treatment of the islanders by the government after a catalyst natural disaster. This year marks the 5th anniversary of hurricane Maria passing through Puerto Rico, and the repercussions, as well the blue tarps, still mingle on the island and beyond.