AUSTIN, TEXAS.- The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas presents the exhibit WorkSpace: Cristián Silva Black Sun — Green Flamingo through December 31. Trained in the field of printmaking in the late 1980s and part of the first generation of artists from Chile's post-dictatorship era, Cristián Silva has become a renowned artist on the Latin American contemporary art scene. Inspired by a wide range of subjects that are on one level deeply personal as well as part of the general culture, Silva creates wall paintings, sculptures, installations, videos and drawings that build together an allegorical environment richly embedded with sociopolitical quotes. Golf balls, plastic bottles, peach pits, chocolate bars, an oversized machete, discarded tartan clothes, potatoes or an old window blind, become part of Silva's symbolic alphabet, one that ambiguously negotiates with the never ending issues of post-colonial identity and class struggle in Latin America.

For the Blanton, Silva is creating Black Sun—Green Flamingo, a new, large-scale installation. Deeply concerned by the dramatic dynamics of frontier politics along the Rio Grande area, Silva looks to a legendary Texan local album cover of the early 1980s to comment on the dreams of the Promised Land held by people from both sides of the border. Based on this slightly kitschy and surreal image source, Silva elaborates on the poetics of migration.