Amerika

CARA’s Summer 2024 exhibition, Javier Téllez: Amerika, is Javier Téllez’s (b. 1969, Venezuela; lives and works in New York) first institutional solo exhibition in New York City in nearly two decades. The exhibition showcases a newly commissioned film installation Amerika, alongside a series of works related to the film, as well as a selection from a never-before-exhibited atlas of photographic images cropped and collected by the artist from illustrated magazines and books over the past twenty years. This solo exhibition centers around the film installation Amerika, commissioned by CARA. Drawing from cinema histories and vaudeville, Amerika mobilizes reenactment, fiction, and metaphor to respond to the ongoing exodus of millions of Venezuelans from their home, motivated by continued violence and socioeconomic collapse. Téllez produced Amerika in collaboration with Andreina Arias, José Díaz, Luisandra Escalona, Leonardo Masa, Nazareth Merentes, Jesus Ramirez, Omar Ríos, and Mariana Vargas—a group of Venezuelan refugees currently living in New York. Téllez, himself an immigrant from Venezuela who has been living in New York since 1993, worked with these non-professional actors to produce a short film inspired by the work of Charlie Chaplin—the iconic actor and filmmaker who challenged authority and social control in his work, advocating for social justice and human rights. Téllez and his collaborators reenact scenes from these films to question power, hegemony, and intolerance toward the other through a collectively developed script that uses narrative to highlight the shared concerns and experiences of migrant communities. Amerika portrays and condemns the abuse of power in totalitarian regimes, and renders both the gravity of loss and the necessity of hope that comes with fleeing one flawed paradise in search of another. Additionally, CARA presents for the first time an archive of photographic images cropped and collected by the artist from illustrated magazines and books that explore archetypal representation of subjects like masks, mirrors, cinema screens, taxidermy, waxworks, miniatures cities, maps, dollhouses, Bunraku, and skulls. Téllez’s rigorous collecting practice generates a working library of references that record how certain visual metaphors, tropes, and references reemerge in the production of cinema and storytelling.

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225 W 13th St

Downtown, NY