Roots

Grounded in Parlá's personal first-generation Cuban American immigrant family story and an ever-evolving practice that concerns exiled communities and their contribution to America, 'Roots' offers a new visual relationship with its pictorially contemplative environment in order to consider connections between local history and the past, present, and future.

Parlá produces a gestural landscape with juxtaposed characters, hieroglyphs, and words within paintings and sculptures that are deliberately created to serve as carriers of meaning. The titles of his works often create playful connotations as signifiers to specific places or times, thus becoming clues to decoding the work.

Parlá's grandfather was an aviation pioneer who flew between Key West and Mariel, Cuba, on a biplane made of sugarcane and bamboo, which he named Caña Brava. The Cuban aviator's legacy continues to serve as an inspiration to the artist and his family. José Parlá spent his formative years immersed in the thriving underground art scenes of Miami, while frequently traveling to other cities, including Beijing, Havana, Istanbul, New York, Paris, Sydney, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, London, and San Juan, as well as to many other countries in which the multicultural environment and social processes deeply impacted his perception of urban space. In his practice, like his grandfather's flight between the United States and Cuba in 1912, José Parlá highlights the cultural bonds between communities and the expression thereof.