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Ada Trillo
Ada Trillo
Ada Trillo

Ada Trillo

Country: United States
Birth: 1976

Ada Trillo is a photographer based in Philadelphia, PA, and Juarez, Mexico. Trillo holds degrees from the Istituto Marangoni in Milan and Drexel University in Philadelphia. Trillo's work is concerned with human rights issues facing Latin America. Trillo has documented forced prostitution in Juarez, Mexico, the infamous La Bestia train, the migrant caravans of 2018 and 2020, and the struggles of asylum seekers directly affected by Trump's Remain in Mexico policy. Trillo has exhibited internationally at Saint Josephs University in Philadelphia, The Photo Meetings in Luxembourg, The Passion for Freedom Art Festival in London, Festival Internazionale di Fotografia in Cortona Italy and at the Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery at the John Jay College in New, York. In 2017, Trillo received a Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grant. Her work has been featured in The British Journal of Photography, The Guardian, and Smithsonian Magazine. Trillo was recently awarded a CFEVA Fellowship by The Center For Emerging Visual Artists and was named the Visual Artist-in-Residence for Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia. Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The West Collection. Trillo was awarded First Place in Editorial Photos with the Tokyo International Foto Awards. She was recently awarded the ME&Eve grant with the Center of photographic arts in Santa Fe.

Statement
I was born in El Paso, Texas but I was raised in Juarez, Mexico. As a teenager, I traveled back and forth between the two cities so I could attend school in the states. Witnessing life on the border as a young adult had a strong influence on my worldview and art practice. After years of working as a painter, I picked up a camera and started making pictures.

For the past four years, I've been documenting the journey migrants take to reach the US-Mexico border. In 2017, I photographed aboard the infamous La Bestia, a dangerous journey by a freight train that migrants from Mexico and Central America ride every year to reach the border. In 2018 & 2019 I photographed overpopulated migrant shelters in Juarez and Tijuana. I also traveled with the migrant caravans of 2018 and 2020, from Honduras, through Guatemala, and into Mexico. In 2019, I photographed asylum seekers who were barred entry into the US under Trump's, Remain in Mexico Policy.

While the media often covers what is happening at the border, they all too often overlook the individual trials, struggles, and humanity of those seeking to escape violence in pursuit of a better life. Spending countless days and nights living alongside those I photograph, I hope to present an honest, unadulterated view of migrant life. I photograph exclusively with a 35mm camera and fixed lenses. My process of making pictures is about creating real connections with my subjects in search of depth and intimacy in my work. My goal is to humanize their struggle and share their stories with the world.
 

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Homai Vyarawalla
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Ydeen received his BA in painting and sculpture at Virginia Tech under Ray Kass, and his MFA in painting and sculpture at Brooklyn College (Fellowship) under Robert Henry, Phillip Pearlstein, and Alan D’Arcangelo, followed by a scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and a fellowship to the Sculpture Center in NYC. Following his education, he made his way as a technician in a number of fields, including technical illustration, industrial set construction, display, architectural drafting, and model making. He was the Director of Joseph Zelvin Models, where he built finished models for many architects, including Philip Johnson, Michael Graves, and Robert Stern, and for several years ran the model shop for the visionary architect Emilio Ambasz, with many of Ydeen’s models being published and exhibited. This period of exacting craftsmanship later became an important foundation for his immersive three-dimensional photography installations and hand-built framing techniques applied to his many exhibits. After meeting his wife, the art dealer Mei Li Dong, and with the help of African art dealer and scholar Marc Leo Felix, they opened the gallery Arts du Monde Inc. in New York City, selling African, Chinese, and Tibetan art and presenting a number of important exhibitions. This experience furthered his knowledge of display, working with designers such as Joaquin Carter, as well as enabling him to handle a vast cross-section of art daily, providing a humbling lesson in the aesthetics and history of those traditions. Easton Nights Easton Nights is a story which grew from the unique and uncommon valley in which the city lies; and is told with the images of unpeopled landscapes taken at night. Here, in the small hours, the world we see as mundane, cascades into dream. Like a surreal scene from a Guillermo del Toro film, trash bins and Toyotas, stop signs and doorways; all become animated. They lean; they stretch, and emanate, all with umbrageous hues, which seem to exhale from the nights own personal color wheel. Scattered signs give the words, marking our place in time, while the geometries show our relentless effort to arrange our world in a box. These are our stages, with the houses our beehives, the machines our toys, and the doors our portals. Complete they are a mimesis of our daily life, as can only shown in the mystical emptiness of night. Then with the dawn comes the beginning, where we all wake, then act; all while these magical and romantic worlds return to sleep. WAITING FOR PALMS Waiting for Palms is a series of urban landscape photographs taken in two corners of North Africa—Morocco and Egypt—that reflect their contrasting peoples and places with a gestalt that is private and colorful, foreign yet familiar, and often fiercely guarded. The photographs capture a world brought inward only to reemerge through the landscapes' 'spirit of place,' where every corner is layered with an unusual elegance and underlying beauty—a waiting and wanting—all presented to us as if the seen world is built on top of a myriad of swallowed dreams. BLACK WHITE and GRAY Black White and Gray is a series of urban landscape photographs shot along the eighty mile I-78 corridor, beginning in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, traveling through a cross section of both desolate and urbanized New Jersey, and then landing in the core of New York City. These are Images living in the mid tones, which find their origins in the stoic tenets of New Topographics only to wander towards a more romantic embrace of the animism of our places; a quality so often unseen in our daily life. This is a Lewis Baltz industrial park with a Bertolucci perspective, or a Robert Adams trailer topped with a Fragonard Cloud. Here, geometry melds with movement, sometimes contorted. cluttered or even stretched like a rubber band, while still presenting a respect of the classic, formal and academic qualities of our built environment. There is an overlay of chimerical wonderment which reflects the dreams and concerns of the countless stream of unobservant passersby who traverse these spaces daily. Gray, both in tone and subject matter, this is a study built with tensions which then lay us down in an elegant romance, interacting with both the monumental shapes and structures which move from simplicity into the cacophony of our urban landscape. Commuter Motions Traveling from the industrial town of Easton, Pennsylvania, through sparsely populated western New Jersey, and into the cacophony of New York City, Commuter Motions is a photography series that develops from the experiential capture of an eighty-mile commute. By opposing the usual fixity of photography, the series attempts to capture the energy and movement of that commute using an almost Bergsonian approach, which, through time-lapse, builds images from segments of a continuous dynamic. These photographs are not about the specificity of a “decisive moment” but are more in line with the thoughts and theories of late 19th and early 20th-century artists, who were immersed in the concepts of perpetuity, fleeting moments, change, chance and dynamism. Time surfaces as a fourth verity, adding to Robert Adam’s three: geography, biography and metaphor. It is that fourth that which gives us not a moment in time, but instead, a cross-section of a continuum. The usually narrow focus of our memory is substituted with an accumulation of peripheral vision, which creates an image reflecting the gestalt of these movements, a gestalt we perceive and experience but do not visually remember. Through this unusual form of capture, Commuter Motions frames the labyrinth of oscillating movements of our highways, bridges, and cities into photographs that reflect the élan vital of our daily commute. Winner AAP Magazine 45 Travels
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