About

Hello,

 My name is Rolando and I’m a Cuban born artist who did much of my growing up in the Flathead Valley. I should start by saying that art is a practice in observation for me. It’s how I perceive, filter, and interpret the world around me based on my own lived experiences. Through my photography and writing I explore themes of displacement, isolation, loneliness, but also love and happiness. It’s how I attempt to understand my own journey through a refugee camp as a young boy, exile from my birth country, my life in Switzerland and the Western US, as well as my idea of ‘home’ and what that represents. It’s a culmination of locations, experiences, and landscapes threaded together. I explore moods and identities that don’t want to be calcified into any one form, welcoming interpretation. What you may notice in these images is a vagueness that is both eerily familiar and ambiguous—allusive in its nod to the standard form of landscape and street photography, and elusive in its dream-like quality. It’s a reminder to myself that I can be who I want to be, not who I think I should be. More than that, it’s a reminder to you, the viewer, to not take things too seriously. Don’t read deeply into meaning if you don’t want to. These pieces did what they needed to do for me…now they’re here for you to make of them what you want.