Gabriel Ramos was born in 1987 in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico, and currently lives and works in Tampa Bay, FL. He obtained his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from the University of South Florida in 2011 and his Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University in 2018. Some of his recent noted achievements include receiving the 2019 Creative Pinellas Professional Artist Grant and the Cornell Council for the Arts Grant. His work has been featured in many local and international publications. It has been shown nationally and internationally in locations such as the National Gallery of the Bahamas, The National Gallery of Jamaica, The FotoFest Biennial, and The Gasparilla International Film Festival. His current artwork is mainly sculpture and installation, but it also includes drawing, video, and photography.
Artist Statement: My work references a fragmented imaginary space that is layered, anomalous, and uncanny, a place that is surreal, familiar yet abstracted, and only accessible through the investigation of remote details and signifiers. It involves the construction of abstracted compositions, often in a linear manner aligned to a fusion of tropical landscape elements, architecture, and various other representational components. The inspiration for these constructions is drawn from childhood memories of my home in Puerto Rico, reflections on cultural amnesia, identity, displacement, and the potentiality of the line in humor, transformation, failure, and action.
