SAD TROPICS :: Cristina Molina + Jonathan Traviesa

8.15.18

Main Gallery

Tempus Projects is pleased to present Sad Tropics, a new iteration of an on-going collaboration by New Orleans-based artists Cristina Molina and Jonathan Traviesa from September 15th – November 2nd, 2018. As both Gulf Coast residents and Florida natives, Molina’s and Traviesa’s travels to South Florida, along rural roads and coastal routes, stimulated the concepts for Sad Tropics as a celebration and critique of the eccentricities of the Florida aspiration expressed through photo-murals, videos, and installations.

Inspired by the title of Claude Levi-Strauss’s 1955 travelogue Tristes Tropiques, Sad Tropics focuses on the psychological landscape of paradise, the tropics, and more specifically—the mythology of Florida. Florida is not quite the “feast of flowers” that Ponce de Leon and his crew described. Yet still, this marsh territory lined by beaches is where settlers young and old have historically and presently escaped to establish their own vision of utopia. Sad Tropics reflects the hyperbolic ambition embedded within Floridian culture—images of modernist geodesic architecture are mingled with tricked-out limousines, a stop-motion animation named Florida Man + Woman features top news headlines of ridiculous crimes committed by Floridians, and photo murals of lush foliage immerse viewers in the Gothic Floridian landscape.