Emerging Voice & Vision
Introspective:Art For Joy, Love and Life
Amber Robles-Gordon received some blunt criticism during her graduate studies when she was told she couldn’t seem to separate herself from her artwork. Robles-Gordon became introspective, and identified why she’s so entrenched in her art.
Community Voice Project is a collaboration with the Department of Anthropology in the College of Arts & Sciences and the University Library. American University’s School of Communication and College of Arts and Sciences.
Amber Robles-Gordon
Amber Robles-Gordon is a mixed media artist. Her preferred medium is collage and assemblage. She also works with pastels, acrylic, watercolors, photography and oil paint sticks. She then merges these mediums into to her collages.
Her work is representational of her experiences and the paradoxes within the female experience. She focuses on fusing found objects to convey her own personal memories, inspired by nature, womanhood and her belief in recycling energy and materials.
Robles-Gordon has over fifteen years of exhibiting and art educational experience. She completed her Masters of Fine Arts from Howard University in December 2010, where she has received annual awards and accolades for her artwork. She has exhibited in California, Germany, Italy, Malaysia, New York, Ohio, Spain and throughout the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan area.
Robles-Gordon has been commissioned by the Smithsonian Anacostia Museum and Center of African American History and other organizations to teach workshops about creating paper mosaics and collages. She was commissioned by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities in 2010 to create a mural for the Windows in to DC project at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. Most recently, she has been granted an apprenticeship from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, D.C. Creates Public Arts Program.
Cosmic Black III, mixed media on canvas, 22 x 22 x 22"
Artist Statement [ Excerpt ]
My artistic compositions reflect my gender and are also a visual representation of my hybridism: a fusion of my ethnic, cultural, and social experiences. I intentionally impose colors, imagery, and materials that evoke femininity, tranquility, and positive concepts with the intent of transcending or balancing a specific form. I associate working with light, color, and energy as a positive means to focus on the healing power found within all of us.
We function in a world, where change is the only constant. Everything in our universe will and has to change, be used, recycled and/or maintained. In order to evolve we constantly have to reassess and redefine what we value and how we manage, appreciate, and maintain our resources. Through my work I seek to examine the parallels between how humanity perceives its greatest resources, man/woman power verses how we treat our possessions and environment.
Untitled
Amber Robles-Gordon works in a studio full of the accumulations necessary to create her work. Bits of fabric, tile, beads, string, ribbons, and wire are collected and organized, ready to become mixed media wall oriented pieces. Some of her works are structured and geometric, while others are masses of vibrant complexity organized around basic shapes such as an eye, the DNA helix or a rising wingspan. These are works that entice the viewer to look in as well as at, to experience fully a carefully controlled chaos and all the beautiful paradoxes encompassed therein.
Andre S. Belcher - Contributor