Rest Ashore With Rest Ashore (2020) at Locust Projects, Valdés incorporated video into her practice for the first time. The multimedia installation at
Locust Projects explores how the refugee crisis has been documented and disseminated in mass media throughout the years, both past and present. The exhibition also featured Waves of Migration: a multimedia sculpture of
CRT televisions facing opposite each other, each screen depicting different decades of Cuban migration—the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s—through archival footage to tell the story of each wave of migration. The project continues Valdés's thematic exploration of bodies of water, which have always played a significant role in her practice and the way she perceives and reimagines the Caribbean. Throughout her career, Valdés has reexamined her personal experience of migration and how it relates to the current global refugee crisis. According to Valdés, “My recent work focuses on migration because I see it as one of the most significant issues of the 21st century. 79.5 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide at the end of 2019. I recently heard on the news that Venezuela would soon replace Syria with the largest number of displaced people. And it is not just countries in war or political conflict. The future will bring climate change refugees, as it already happened with
hurricane Katrina.”
Terrestrial Bodies Terrestrial Bodies (2019) resulted from a multi-year process of collecting mass-produced collectible porcelain objects from around the world. Working with the language of anthropology and archeology, Valdés demonstrates how the legacy of colonization is entrenched in institutions, social structures, and, most importantly, in objects. A timeline of her mother's ancestry, compiled by the genetic testing service 23andMe, roots my family heritage at a crossroads between Africa, Asia, and the Americas, revealing how the ancestry of black and brown populations is inextricably linked to trade and globalization.
Colored Bone China Rags Valdés created The Colored Rag series by adding skin-toned powder pigments in the clay prior to firing, thereby manipulating its chemical composition and changing its color. The intention is to question the mythology of whiteness as pure relative to notions of Mestizaje in the Caribbean, and link bodies to the physical constitution of bone china and its extraction and displacement as a raw material and commercial good. The Colored China Rags also create visual analogs between rags used by cleaning women, the suppleness of a woman's body, and the range of skin tones in ethnically mixed communities. Subsequently, arranged, the work presents the myth of post-racial America as an increasingly far-fetched utopia. ==Solo exhibitions==