The In-Between: Michael Cuadrado Gonzalez & Erin LaRocque

For the final show of our 20th anniversary year, we again have curated a special _Double Exposure_ program from our archive of past submissions, pairing two artists who we regret having never shown. The curation of these shows is meant to illuminate an important value of Roots & Culture—honoring the dignity of our applicants. We are sensitive to the time and energy that artists dedicate to submitting proposals. As artists, ourselves, we are intimately familiar with the sinking feeling of receiving rejections. We have always prioritized repeat applicants in our review process — artists who have shown a strong determination to exhibit at Roots & Culture and had the grit to apply multiple times. For this pairing we will present new work by two artists, Michael Cuadrado Gonzalez & Erin LaRocque, with seemingly disparate practices. We might be given too much credit for clever curatorial choices in pairing artists for Double Exposure, when in fact, we are simply honoring the data of the highest scoring applicants (and these two artists consistently ranked very highly with their submissions.) On the other hand, an under-rated aspect of the program is a dynamic tension that can arise from two bodies of work that on face value may not have any clear throughlines — creating new meanings and aesthetic vibrations. We know this show will be a stunner. Both artists work in abstraction and there is in fact, a commonality to their approaches — their practices ask questions about inclusion in a historically exclusionary discipline, both in terms of authorship and media.