FLUID DYNAMICS

FLUID DYNAMICS, a solo exhibition Maria Gómez-Umaña at Gallery La Fab
in Chelsea. Vernissage on Saturday March 28 from 1 to 4 PM. The
exhibition ends on May 3rd.

8, Chemin Mill, Chelsea, Quebec J9B1K8
Open Monday to Thursday from 9:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., and Friday to
Sunday from 1:00 P.M. to 4:00 P.M.

Maria Gomez-Umaña's resilience may be attributed to her art practice.
No Colombian navigates their way in this world without haunting,
visceral memories of human capacity for cruelty, avarice and
duplicity. No nation of people – expat or otherwise – can match the
indelible and fierce allegiance to place. As author and explorer, Wade
Davis says: “Colombia is most assuredly not a place of violence and
drugs; it is a land of colores y cariño, where people have endured and
overcome years of conflict precisely because of their
character…informed by an enduring spirit of place, a deep love of a
land that is perhaps the most bountiful on earth, home of the greatest
ecological and geographic diversity on the planet.”

Since childhood, Gomez has lived with the legacy of Colombia’s
troubled history and retained the dignity and grace of its ancestors
both European and Amerindian; held fast to the deep and timeless roots
of her place – that region of vast richness: natural, cultural,
spiritual.

What do you do with the anger, the fear and the outrage in to which
you were born and raised? Colombians turn to one thing that for time
immemorial has sustained them, perhaps even become their temple of
resilience. Wade Davis again: “The Rio Magdalena is…the reason
Colombia exists as a nation…the well spring of Colombian music,
literature, poetry, and prayer. In dark times, it has served as the
graveyard of the nation, a slurry of the shapeless dead. And yet
always, it returns as a river of life.”

Thus, Maria’s dream space, her muse, her source of resilience is one
of flow. Abandoning the violence of Colombia, she has sought safety
and peace. Yet, she remains a migrant; her art the metaphor for both
her yearning and her loss. In her work, you see the lifeforce of the
river and the river’s essential place in the heart of the richest,
most complex and beautiful ecosystems on the planet, inseparable from
the Colombian gestalt. Her boat is adrift but utterly safe, held in
the embracing ecology of the flow. Within her gentle, loving drawings
are those symbols of hope: seminal, organic, connected, spiritual.
Maria’s flow carries us on our life’s journey. Maria’s vision of that
journey is astonishingly optimistic, generous and sublime.

Curator Paul Gilbert