BETWEEN ISLANDS AND PENINSULAS
On a platform situated just outside the Bakehouse Art Complex’s Audrey Love Gallery, artist Amanda Linares presents Between Islands and Peninsulas. The sculptural installation is made up of three separate elements that come together as a table, accompanied by an artist book, that represents her journey from Havana to Miami in 2013. Through the use of text, images, and found objects, Linares reflects on the immigrant experience and explores themes of identity, memory, displacement, absence, and reconnection.
In Between Islands and Peninsulas, three separate elements are installed as one larger table and function as tangible representations of three distinct parts of Linares’ journey: the island of Cuba, the ocean between, and the Florida peninsula. The tables have grid-like patterns the artist utilizes to map the spatial relationships between the different places. The grid becomes a way for Linares to contextualize and organize her personal narrative. On the tables, she places artist books that are chapters of a larger story, like topographical elements in a scattered geography.
The construction and placement of the installation also function to guide the narrative quality of the work. They require the viewer to take an active part by walking around the tables and stopping to navigate the pages of the books. In a way, the viewer is taken on their own journey, mirroring the one Linares represents through her work, an immigrant’s story that transports you over time, space, and destinations.
Linares’ varied use of materials allows her to create works that are simultaneously delicate yet durable. She seeks to capture the contradictions of the human condition through materiality. By using seemingly dissonant mediums in individual works, she is able to convey the coexistence of contradictory feelings and ideas.
Link here to read the full article written by Laura Novoa, Curatorial + Public Programs Associate of the Bakehouse Art Complex.
2020
EXHIBITIONS
CONCRETE FAÇADE
Dot FiftyOne Gallery, Miami, FL
April 6 - May 30, 2025
Concrete Façade is a group photography exhibition that explores the complex interplay of form, memory, and politics through the lens of architecture. Featuring works by Anastasia Samoylova, Linet Sánchez, Edison Peñafiel, Gian Paolo Minelli, Amanda Linares, and Mitzi Falcón, the exhibition examines façades as both masks and mirrors—structures that conceal deeper truths while shaping perception. Through their images, the artists peel back layers of history, identity, and power embedded in the built environment, inviting viewers to question the authenticity of the surfaces that define our surroundings.
Brought together by Edison Peñafiel and accompanied by an exhibition essay by Aldeide Delgado, Concrete Facade is presented with the support of ArtSeen365 and MAD Arts.
Exhibition Essay: CONCRETE FAÇADE - Demystifying Truth In Photography by Aldeide Delgado.
YOU BELONG HERE
Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami, FL
January 20 - May 12, 2024
You Belong Here assembles work from established and emerging artists alike covering themes of political resistance, family and community, material culture, and the nuance of identity within the context of the United States.
Featured in this expansive exhibition are Reynaldo Rivera’s images of 1990s-era Los Angeles nightlife, Sofía Córdova’s film installation about labor and collectivity, and Bibs Moreno’s collaborative portraits of Gabriela Ruiz in her signature elaborate style. From John M. Valadez to Tarrah Krajnak, these artists connect a lineage of photographers, each championing their communities through their own distinct and generative gazes. “Collectively, their images cast a greater net for the multiple ways of seeing Latinx people,” Pilar Tompkins Rivas notes of the photographers, “creating a visual archive whose edges are yet to be defined.”
This group exhibition celebrates the rich variety of practices by Latinx photographers across the United States. Curated by Pilar Tompkins Rivas, chief curator at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, the exhibition extends from Tompkins Rivas’s work as guest editor of “Latinx,” the Winter 2021 issue of Aperture magazine.
