Prerogative – a new exhibit opens at the Mexican Institute

Four budding Belizean artists are holding an art exhibition called ‘Prerogative’, the venue is the Mexican Institute. The exhibit includes a wide range of pieces that were completed individually by the four in the past two years using watercolors, acrylic and Chinese paint. The topics are diverse; some pieces are abstract, others appeal to your mood. The four artists are young students from St John’s College who are enrolled in college’s art program.  The exhibition opens tonight so head over to the Mexican Institute to support Rasheed H. Palacio, Valerie Penner, Rudolph J. Rodriguez and Giovanni Perez.  Earlier today Duane Moody caught up with the Institute’s Marcelino Miranda and artists, Perez and Palacio, as they were putting the final touches to the exhibition.

Giovanni Perez, Artist

Giovanni Perez

“This is my first art show and we are collaborating with four artists and we are putting it together within a month. We’ve been working really hard on it and a lot of our pieces, we have been expressing ourselves through them. So that’s how we decided to talk to the embassy itself and work on getting this show up because it expresses us as how we feel through our artwork. I focus more on individual feeling and I expect that people will actually relate to a lot of the different artworks that I give out there because I pay a lot of attention to details in certain aspects of life and through that I actually sit down and put that in my paintings as well. And like that a lot of people can actually relate to how I feel when I put my paintings up.  I tend to include everything from acrylic to oil to crafts to everything in my art pieces because I give myself no limit to how I want to express it. So then if I see something and say I want to put crayons or maybe colouring pencil or acrylic paint or just sheets of paper; that’s how I do it. I try to express it through that.”

Rasheed Palacio

Rasheed Palacio, Artist

“I’ve been painting for over five years now and what I am showcasing is works I’ve done over my time at SJC—ranging from actual, physical paintings that I’ve done with acrylics to water colour and also digitally painting in Photoshop.”

Duane Moody

“What do you expect those coming to the exhibit tonight to take away after they’ve seen your piece?”

Rasheed Palacio

“Well I just hope they can take away a good idea of what we are about and how diverse young people are in Belize.”

Duane Moody

“How do you distinguish yourself apart from the other artists displaying their pieces out here?”

Rasheed Palacio

“To distinguish my work…it has a somewhat tone of surrealism in it and also things that you will be able to identify within the works. Even though it is a completely distorted view, you can still recognise certain things to help you to get a better understanding of the image in front of you.”

Marcelino Miranda

Marcelino Miranda, Press Officer, Mexican Embassy

“The embassy of Mexico has been opened all the time to not only host Mexican artists, but also Belizean artists. In this case, this group of artists came to the Mexican Embassy and presented what they think was their work available to come up with an exhibition. So the embassy thought that it would be a really good idea, especially because of the quality of the work, their talent. Therefore the embassy decided to support this project and this is also part of the 2014culutral program of the Mexican embassy.”

If you can’t catch the opening night, you can view the exhibition until thirteenth of June. The art work is also on sale.