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Rydel Cerezo | Aperture Summer Open: Delirious Cities

Rydel Cerezo | Aperture Summer Open: Delirious Cities

Recent alum Rydel Cerezo is one of the twenty-three artists selected for Aperture’s 2019 Summer Open exhibition, Delirious Cities, that explores how photographs can define the diversity of urban experience today. In his work, Am I a Sea, Rydel addresses his relationship with Roman Catholicism as a queer Filipino man.

“I use my younger brother as a mirror to reflect the precarity of my position in this inescapable relationship fraught with trauma and love provided by the institution and the home,” says Rydel. “The inability to escape is realized as a consequence of centuries of colonization and familial inheritance. I am interested in the history of the church that served as a tool involved in the colonial mission and now acts as a space for bodies to commune with one another in the Diaspora. Playing between the spaces of what is staged and what is documentary, Am I a Sea disrupts the gesture within a ritual. This work is an attempt to re-navigate and probe the familiar space that is the church in relation to the living post-colonized body.”

While Delirious Cities takes place in NYC, there’s an opportunity in Vancouver to see Rydel’s work this June. Exhibiting with fellow alum Simon Grefiel, Rydel will be previewing his work that will be shown at Delirious Cities. The exhibition takes place at Ground Floor Art Centre, opening June 13th from 7 to 11 PM.

Rydel Cerezo is a Filipino – Canadian artist residing in Vancouver, Canada. His work investigates the space between,sexuality and religion, race and beauty, and identity and culture. He is interested in how these disparate themes metaphorically and visually coalesce. Aware of the historical ethnographic use of photography as tool to ‘capture’ particular cultures, he works to reposition this practice by employing the camera to reflect on his own individual identity that has equally lived in the Philippines and Canada through immigration. Cerezo has recently graduated with a Bachelors of Fine Arts Degree from Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

The Aperture Summer Open is an annual open-submission exhibition at Aperture Foundation’s gallery in New York, featuring a wide variety of work by photographers and lens-based artists from around the world. Selected by a jury of leading editors, curators, and writers, the exhibition seeks to reveal and report on key themes and trends driving contemporary photography. The exhibition opens the doors to photographers of all ages, at all points in their careers, as we seek to promote new ideas and talent.

The twenty-three artists selected for Aperture’s 2019 Summer Open exhibition, Delirious Cities, explore how photographs can define the diversity of urban experience today. The Summer Open is curated by Brendan Embser, managing editor, Aperture magazine; Matthew Leifheit, artist and editor of MATTE magazine; Chiara Bardelli Nonino, photo editor, Vogue Italia and L’Uomo VogueAzu Nwagbogu, director of African Artists’ Foundation and LagosPhoto; and Guadalupe Rosales, artist and founder of Veteranas & Rucas and Map Pointz.

Exhibition on view: July 25 – August 29, 2019

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