“...Juan Carlos Zaldívar provides the most emotionally charged piece [at Filtro Foto’s “Cuba: As Time Stands Still, 2007] a video installation about the Elián González debacle in 2000. On a split screen, viewers watch protest rallies taking place simultaneously in Cuba and Miami. At the Cuban rally, the crowd roars, “Freedom for Elián!” In Miami the protesters are shouting “Elián will not leave!” A revolutionary anthem is spliced with  a pre-Revolution anthem. Interviews with a Miami student and a Cuban student, both in their school uniforms, play on split screens. The footage is choppy, and the competing sounds make it difficult to focus on particular statements, illustrating both the intensity and the complexity of the issue...”

April, 2007

- Victor Barrenechea of the Biscayne Times

Selected  press

“Delicate work ... that of an alchemist, transforming the ordinary. “

1. -Susan Hopper, Deluxe Arts
   

“A great art happening à la Warhol style! Cannot be missed! “

- Thomas Barker, The Wire

“You might say Juan Carlos Zaldivar is a master of reality. When you enter one of his exhibits ... the outside world suddenly seems very far away.”

- Carlos Suarez de Jesús, The Miami New Times

additional press upon request

“STRINGS, the current exhibition by Juan Carlos Zaldivar at Gallery Dot 51, represents a unique examination of the basis of perception, the material and ephemeral, using video and sculpture. (...) These three pieces stand out as more theoretical applications of how visual perception is a subjective, interpretive process than a translation of some sort of doctrine of reality. Inundated with film and video as we are, and mostly invited to consider all this material as ‘real’ - not least at a moment when most artist video seems to be more narrative or animative - these seem like quiet reminders that not only what you see isn’t necessarily what you get, it’s not necessarily what happened either.”

June 2008

David Rhon, ArtLurker

filmmaker/artist

juan carlos zaldívar

press