Betsy Exhibitions

Juan Carlos Zaldívar (Violenta Flores) is a filmmaker, video artist and professor. As sound designer, Z worked in Academy Nominated films (Ang Lee's "Sense and Sensibility;" "On the ropes”), and on HBO’s America Undercover, for which they garnered an Emmy nomination. Their works have screened at many festivals worldwide; broadcast on PBS, ABC, IFC, Showtime & WE; exhibited at museums & art fairs; and received numerous grants and awards.

Directing credits include "90 Miles" (PBS), "The Story of the Red Rose" (Showtime), "Palingenesis" and "Soldiers Pay" (IFC), co- directed with David O. Russell. Zaldivar served as a Juror at Sundance FF. VR credits include “A History of Cuban Dance” (Sundance 2016; WithIn) and the feature doc "Buena Vista Social Club: Adiós”. Zaldivar has presented performances the Hammer Museum in LA and the Miami Light Project’s Here and Now Festival. They are a 2019 Venice Biennale Cinema College alum and is producing "Remembering to forget" a feature doc which reframes how we look at dementia.

Artist Statement
Moving images are like humans in that they, too, need a body to express their energetic nature. We are in awe of the impermanence, transmutations and transcendences of the physical. I/We transform spaces, objects and our own body. Human relationship to physicality is at the core of our work. The principle of adaptation is also present in my work as it applies to natural survival, and to human migrations. As humans continue to colonize the earth, more and more species will go extinct and may never be recovered in their original form. Some of our projects seek to encapsulate these rare species and experiences, which retain a certain archetypal meaning--such as feeding a wild bird in our hands holding a fluttering butterfly, or the wish to see a flower opening beyond “real time". Moving images are often equated with human memories. It is perplexing that moving images are an optical illusions, yet are widely accepted as “truthful” in our culture.

Furthermore, they have become integral to how humans understand, validate, and even dare to create new realities. This property of moving images has become a double-edged sword because new technologies are becoming so sophisticated that humans can easily confuse what is actual or “real”. We are interested in the relationship between natural and artificial constructions because it triggers larger questions about our humanity, and because a dialogue between these two elements often spins other dialogues about identity, history, transculturalism, power and acceptance.

All images used with permission of the artist.