The artist has dedicated her practice to documenting houses in working-class communities like the one she lived in as a child.
Edra Soto is a Chicago-based artist whose exhibition “Graft” is on view in New York’s Central Park through August 24.
“I grew up with my mom, dad, and brother in a lower-middle-class community in the metropolitan area of Puerto Rico, in the San Juan area. It was a gated community, and all the houses in it were built around the fifties and the sixties. I went to the same school, located right in front of the neighborhood, from kindergarten to my senior year. My entire life was very much contained in this community.
The house had a big wall of breeze blocks that fenced it in from the outside. Because the homes were laid out right next to each other, the breeze blocks gave visibility to the neighbor’s house. For more privacy, my parents made a kind of plastic fence of corrugated panels, and placed it behind the breeze blocks, creating a dramatic shadow of the blocks’ decorative motif. The furniture inside was wicker and rattan, and also wood.
My parents set the tone for what life was like inside the house. They were very loving people, very protective—maybe overprotective—and strict. The environment felt a bit random. We had a living room with a dining table, and the dining table ended up becoming a place for storing stuff. Junk things, papers, anything. When I was in college, I made a painting about this, called ‘New Centerpiece’: a dining table that had a TV placed in the middle of it. There were televisions everywhere.
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