Head down to HCC Ybor where Florida-based artist Lilian Garcia-Roig is showcasing landscapes from Florida to Cuba. The exhibit, Hyphenated Nature: Lilian Garcia-Roig, is all exploring ideas related to identity, sense of place, and belonging.
According to the Tampa Bay Times, Garcia-Roig was born in Cuba in 1966. Her family moved to the United States in 1968. After living in Texas for 30 years she’s now a Floridian. She lives in Tallahassee where she is a professor and the Chair of the Department of Art at FSU. Her move to the United States impacts the themes of her landscapes.
“I am drawn to the wilderness out of a deep psychological need to connect,” Garcia-Roig says. She creates her multi-panel installations onsite over the course of a day. Her art is trying to capture the experience of being in a specific location over time. The panels capture the dense and beautiful vegetation found in Florida.
In America, I am uninterested in conventional vistas, an it is in seeming unclaimed or raw, dense natural spaces that I feel most at home, where I am temporarily invited yet never fully allowed to enter.
Lilian Garcia-Roig
Also, artist Lilian Garcia-Roig also creates paintings of Cuba. As she is currently not in Cuba, she has a unique way of incorporating her home country into her paintings. Garcia-Roig uses soil she got during her last visit from Cuba. She mixes the soil with the paint she uses to create her art. A way to infuse her current home with the home of her past.
Hyphenated Nature: Lilian Garcia-Roig will be on display at Gallery114 in Ybor until February 24, 2022. There will be a reception for the artist at the gallery on February 17, from 5 — 8 p.m.
