“Bottle of Guayabita”

Please visit our Inman Park location during the month of April to view photography by Ivette Spradlin. Reception April 3, 2009 7:00pm-9:00pm. View more of Ivette’s work at: www.ivettespradlin.com/cuba.html

In this very personal collection of color photographs by Ivette Spradlin, we travel to the island of Cuba, where the artist visited for the first time in July 2006 with her mother and aunt, both Cuban exiles. Most of the images displayed here, taken mainly in Habana, reflect the artist’s intention of documenting not a distinct narrative of her relatives’ or other Cubans’ lives, but rather the interior and quiet places of their homes and surrounding areas. In the artist’s own words, this collection of Cuba images are something of a family photo album, absent her own family in a strict physical sense. The pictures provoke a mood of small-scale domesticity and family life in the viewer, as if we are about to sit at the table with the Novas family and have some beans and tostones, as in “Comida”, or stretch out on a friend’s bed for a nap, as in “Fidel”. This effect is achieved without any sense of any cutesiness or sentimentality, however, and also serve to throw in stark relief a sense of Cuba in both collective poverty, and, at times, decrepit isolation.                                                             

-Betsy Manous

Ms. Spradlin holds an MFA in Photography, which she received from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and from where she recently returned to Atlanta.