Brown Brilliance Darkness Matter
Brown Brilliance Darkness Matter is a multimedia installation which juxtaposes ephemera from the archives of the National Museum of Mexican Art with elements from Gaspar’s family archives. Gaspar selected artifacts and images from the museum's permanent collection that ranged from historic to souvenir imagery and created abstract impressions of their original subject through handmade clay objects, textile collages, and performance. By interweaving distinct images from the museum and her personal collection, Gaspar developed a third image, a hybrid self. In conjunction with the exhibition, six local residents of the museum’s mostly Mexican immigrant community were invited to examine the artifacts through personal facto-fictional narratives. Their performances of these stories in the exhibition space created an intimate exchange of information, giving way to new and reimagined contexts for the iconography and drawing focus to the role that historical materials play in the way we see ourselves and the way institutions can form our understanding of history.
