Gallery 1

Erman

"COCOON" is an interactive solitude station. I am experimenting with the "act of creating" presented as performance while possibly engaging the audience into participating by choosing to sew and create with the available materials or by taking an amulet off the walls. Through its skin, multi-colored capillary and vein-like, "Cocoon" continues my metaphoric conversation about my bi-racial, multi-ethnic and cross-cultural bloodlines similar to those of the many laborers worldwide who sew for a living. In the 60's, as a newly arrived refugee from Cuba, I was a child laborer, earning pennies in exchange for operational piecework in sweatshops throughout Miami. Later in NYC, as designer/owner of the "Erman" label, I made sure that my workers earned a deserved salary, with humane working conditions.

Today, I sit inside "Cocoon" to relive and exorcise some of the demons from my past and to honor piece workers and laborers all over the world in particular the often-illegal migrants! who make up the majority of the sewers in factories across America. Making "talismanic" objects with religious imagery, folkloric Afro-Caribbean colorations imbued with good wishes and well intentions, I also honor "the powers that be " whose guidance and protection helped me survive those experiences. I encourage you to pick your favorite, leave a donation$$$ that will be forwarded to a needy cause and go on with your artistic visual overload experience counting your blessings if you never produced piece work in a factory or counting your blessings, feeling stronger if you survived it... A special "Thank you " To Rosie Gordon-Wallace for her continuous support of emerging, experimental work such as "Cocoon" and for allowing me a "safety zone" to create it and expose it. PAZ Erman [Content provided by Erman]