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Soid Pastrana was born in 1970 in Juchitán, an important
city in the Istmo region of the southern
Mexican state of Oaxaca.
His first exhibition this year, at the Comisión de Derechos
Humanos del Distrito Federal The Federal District (the greater
Mexico City area) Human Rights Commission reflects his ongoing
effort to use art as a powerful presenter of wrongs and an influential
instigator of change. One of the poorest areas in Latin America,
progress in southern Mexico, and Oaxaca in particular, is weighed-down
by an indeterminably-bad track record on human rights issues. Art
has one of the few local voices with the power to be heard by those
at some physical distance away, who, in political terms, are much
closer to being able to help the victims. His investment in these
significant extensions of his field has produced a number of fantastic
opportunites, including being selected to create a mural dedicated
to Benito Juárez, the first Mexican president at the Casa
México in Havana, Cuba. Responsable for defeating the Spanish
and instigating the creation of a post-colonial New World, Benito
Juárez, like Soid Pastrana, Demián
Flores and Luis Valencia, was of
Zapotec descent.
Contemporary of Oaxacan painter Guillermo Olguín, the latter
has remarked that many see Pastrana's work as chillingly reminiscent
of that by legendary Mexican painter, Jesús Urbieta. 'Reincarnation'
is not a word often used in a culture that pays so much attention
to death and its effect on life, but it does seems to fit. Urbieta
was also from Juchitán. He died in 1997.
New works (summer 2006)
Curriculum Vitae
Works
held by Galerķa de Arte Latinoamericano, Mexico City
More
on Soid Pastrana (CV on external site)
The Istmo de Tehuantepec. From the Latin
'isthmus' meaning 'waist' - where Mexico, and the American continent,
go thin on the map.
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