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  • Amber Robles-Gordon
  • Charles H. Rowell

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Portfolio of Artwork 946-948

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Amber Robles-Gordon has been described as “a mixed media artist” whose “preferred medium is collage and assemblage.” “My artwork,” she tells us in her artist statement, written in 2009,

is a visual representation of my hybridism: a fusion of my gender, ethnicity, and cultural and social experiences. I intentionally impose colors, imagery, and materials that evoke femininity and tranquility 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 in the creative process. I believe colors have both feminine and masculine energies and each color represents a specific aspect of nature. I desire my artwork to embody my spiritual connection to color and project a sense of energy to positively affect others. Using found objects allows me to symbolically articulate the need to recycle energy and power inherent to discarded materials. Through my work I seek to examine the parallels between how humanity perceives its greatest resources—men and women—verses how we treat our possessions and environment.

In my interview with Amber Robles-Gordon on June 28, 2015, when I asked her what is art to her now and whether she, in 2015, still affirms the artist statement she wrote in 2007, she responded that

My perception of art shifts, depending on the day, where I am in terms of my personal production of artwork, as well as my external surroundings. Overall I believe artwork should represent one’s life . . . I don’t have a solid definition of what art is to others. However, for me Art is language—a method of communication. It is an extension of my relationship to the universe. I am in constant flux with the various roles that negotiate their voice within my artistry, such as: the woman, the advocate, a person of Caribbean and African descent and/or the humanist. Now, I primarily use found objects and textile to create assemblages, large-scale sculptures, and installations. My sculptures symbolically represent the inequalities of gender-based dynamics within our society. In my sculptures, I use metal armatures, rope, chicken wire, or items used to provide structure or restriction to represent the masculine. The materials used are both masculine and feminine in nature, parts of a boy’s backpack, a tie, jeans, or a girl’s bra, purse, or jewelry. Then like an equation I use color, found objects, and materials to weave through and symbolically balance the original form or metal armature. I create to provide an abstracted-visual resolution to the concrete problems within the matrix of institutional gender and racial inequalities.

Earlier in the interview, I raised questions which, I believe, help to illuminate her artist statement and the above excerpt from the same interview.

ROWELL:

Do you know how your work is received? How do people react to your work—that is, how do some of them react to it?

ROBLES-GORDON:

Honestly people mostly initially respond to the arrangements of color, and then they focus on the objects or fabrics themselves. I create with different fabrics and found objects for their color value. Each object or fabric has a color. Colors are wavelengths of light, a dispersal of energy, and each object is absorbing or reflecting all colors but the color you actually see. I work with this process of perceiving color and refer to it as a color sensation or color energy. I purposefully maximize this process by using an array of colors [End Page 856] arranged together in bursts. Then they tend to examine the actual materials and objects I am using whether it’s the branches, marbles, fabric, belt buckles, or plastic. It is usually the arrangement of color and the actual materials.

ROWELL:

When you say “color value” what are you referring to?

ROBLES-GORDON:

So my master’s degree is in painting but I don’t paint in the traditional sense. Instead, I paint with the colors of the found objects I use. Color value refers to two things: 1) the color that has...

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