El sueño que olvidé antes del alba: Jill Kearney, Elsa Mora, and Sandra Ramos

The doubt of having just dreamed will always be an open door towards magical realism, the questioning of existence and what surrounds us. The exhibition is a space for meditation but also confrontation.

Pan American Art Projects is pleased to announce El sueño que olvidé antes del alba (The Dream I Forgot Before Dawn), a collective exhibition featuring artists Jill Kearney, Elsa Mora, and Sandra Ramos, and curated by Claudia Taboada.
El sueño que olvidé antes del alba is conceived as a visual poem, and aims to establish a correlation with the Traditional Japanese composition of a haiku, by associating its three lines (phrases) with the three artists; their brief but intense statements, with the conceptual strength of the works, apparently “simple” in their visual presentation, requiring to close your eyes to capture their true essence. This is also a self-referential show, as personal life experiences have been translated into installations, videos, objects, and drawings. 
Jill Kearney is a writer, visual artist, arts administrator, and curator. As a child, she spent many formative summers in Provincetown, Mass, where local arts institutions anchored a diverse community of artists, writers, and fishermen. Her parents founded The Contemporary Art Workshop, an art center housed in a rambling former dairy factory in Chicago, Illinois. She graduated from Harvard with a degree in English and Creative Writing, worked in Hollywood as a creative executive at Francis Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios, served as west coast editor of American Film and Premiere Magazine, and later ran the Tribeca Film Center-based offices of Los Angeles film producer Art Linson. From 2000 to 2015 she produced theater, dance, and literary events in a cavernous unheated barn in Bucks County PA, where she developed a deep appreciation for the practice of art as a collaborative enterprise. In 2016 she founded Frenchtown, New Jersey-based ArtYard, an alternative contemporary art center, residency, and theater, with her creative partner Elsa Mora. Jill collaborated with the poet Vasiliki Katsarou on the Disappearing Poems installation.
Elsa Mora is an artist and curator. A recipient of the UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for Artists, she was born and raised in Cuba and moved to Los Angeles in 2001, where she lived until 2014. Mora currently resides in upstate New York with her husband, William Horberg, and their two children. Elsa’s art has been exhibited worldwide in art galleries and museums. She taught at the Vocational School of Arts in Camagüey, Cuba, and has been a visiting artist at the Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco State University, the Art Institute of Boston, the MoMA Design Store, and the National Gallery of Art, among others. Her work is in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; the Long Beach Museum of Art, California; and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon. Mora has collaborated as an illustrator with such organizations as the Museum of Modern Art, Chronicle Books, The New York Review of Books, Penguin Random House, The Oprah Magazine, Cosmopolitan, and teNeues, among others. Mora is one of the founding members of ArtYard, a contemporary art center based in Frenchtown, New Jersey, where she is artistic director and curator.
Sandra Ramos is a visual artist based in Miami. She was educated at the Elemental School of Visual Arts 20 de Octubre, at the San Alejandro Academy and at the Higher Art Institute (ISA); all in Havana, Cuba. Her work illustrates her views of the political and social contemporary context in her country and worldwide. Ramos takes elements and recognizable characters from political cartoons to comment humorously about a very dared reality. Although it is an autobiographical work in many ways, it relates to a generational position, provoking dialogue among private and public, personal and collective memories. Ramos work can be found as part of the collection of prestigious museums and institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, Mass.; National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba; National Royal Museum of Art, Ontario, Canada; Arizona State University Museum, Arizona; Grafik Museum Stiftung Schreiner, Bad Steben, Germany; Lehigh University Museum, Penn University, Philadelphia; Civitella Ranieri Foundation,Italy; Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida; and Ludwig Forum fur Kunst, Aachen, Germany.
Vasiliki Katsarou is a dual Greek/US citizen who grew up in Jack Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. She has also lived in Paris, France, and Harvard, Mass. A poet, editor, filmmaker, and publisher, Vasiliki Katsarou holds an A.B. Phi Beta Kappa in comparative literature from Harvard University and an MFA with distinction from Boston University. She is the author of a full-length poetry collection, Memento Tsunami, and two poetry chapbooks, Three Sea Stones and The Second Home (forthcoming). She is also co-editor of two contemporary poetry anthologies: Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems and Dark as a Hazel Eye: Coffee & Chocolate Poems. Honored as a Geraldine R. Dodge Poet in New Jersey, her poetry has been published widely, and internationally, including in Poetry Daily, Otoliths, Tiferet, Literary Mama, La Vague, NOON (Japan), Corbel Stone Press’ Contemporary Poetry Series (U.K.), Regime Journal (Australia), Mediterranean Poetry (Denmark), and Mandragoras (in Greek translation). One of her poems is archived in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian. She is currently poetry curator at Frenchtown Bookshop and a Teaching Artist at Hunterdon Art Museum in New Jersey.