GROUNDED IN FRAGMENTS

About

Both originally from Venezuela, Beatriz Bellorín and Carolina Otero bring shared memories shaped by migration and motherhood to Grounded in Fragments. As their lives are marked by displacement, their works embody a dialogue with nature as they search for grounding amidst mutual feelings of uprootedness. Through photography, video, installation, and collage, they collect and reinterpret sensory fragments, exploring emotional landscapes encountered in navigating new realities, where nature, memory, and identity intersect.

Beatriz Bellorín is a Venezuelan-American photo-video artist and documentary filmmaker whose work explores identity, memory, displacement, diaspora, and womanhood. Combining anthropological research with autobiography, she uses archival documents and memorabilia to investigate the entanglements of memory and nostalgia, focusing on their emotional impact. Her latest works—spanning photography, video, installation, and cyanotypes—explore the enduring bond between mother and daughter. Driven by a desire to preserve the ephemeral, Beatriz collects, catalogs, and classifies personal and collective memories, ecofacts, family archives, and inherited objects as anchors of past experiences. She recreates a grounding space to reflect on her shifting identity by bringing together fragments of these objects and archives. Bellorín holds an MA in Visual Anthropology from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a BA in Sociology from Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, Caracas. She lives and works in Houston, Texas.

Carolina Otero is a Venezuelan multimedia artist. A graduate of The Cooper Union in New York, she works across various media, including printmaking, drawing, collage, plaster, ceramics, and photography. Her two and three-dimensional art is grounded in a deep engagement with automatic drawing and a chance-driven abstract process of collage. Ad hoc encounters permeate her mark-making and lens-based works. Currently, Otero explores the intersubjective nature of photography, creating visual dialogues between perceptual realities that surround her as an immigrant urban explorer in Houston and other locations she has visited. Distilled images of nature engage with fragmented urban constructs, embodying resonance, identity, evocation, dissonance, isolation, or unexpected presence. In her search for interconnectivity, Otero creates an alternate abstract language that crosses national and international cultural boundaries. She lives and works in Houston.

Exhibition Dates:  Friday, November 15 – Saturday, December 7, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, November 15, 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Gallery Hours: Fridays & Saturdays, 12-6pm  

*For private appointments email: throughlinecollective@gmail.com