Immigration Nation II builds on the theme of Valdez’s recent collaborative community Art Project titled Immigration Nation. Using the suitcase as a vehicle to tell the stories of the many immigrants that form the United States.

As an immigrant herself, Valdez explores the theme of the immigrant and the impact of their journeys from a personal perspective. Her work recalls and investigates the difficult road endured by those seeking and rootedness of home.

Immigration Nation II was also exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston for Memorial Day week on 2018.

For information, please see Boston Sculptors Gallery.

With this work, Valdez continues to explore from her  personal perspective the theme of the immigrant and the impact of the journey. The work is about a feeling that is best expressed in the saying: She is from here, there and nowhere. The feeling of the dislocation experienced while in constant movement, seeking the solace of roots, shapes these sculptures and drawings.

One of the many themes that Valdez focus her work is the theme of Home. She is using symbols that take her home, images and objects that portray her departing from her place and leaving her loved ones behind.

By having objects carry bags, suitcases and traveling by the means of wheels, boats, and ladders, Valdez representing all traveling…drifting away from home… carrying with her all that makes her close and far from home.

She carved these pieces for this show in order to dwell to an inner space and to suggest looking at ourselves, to see who we are, to accept ourselves and carry our baggage not with weight, not with guilt but with the pride of understanding and accepting who we are.

Hearing our answer from deep within and following its direction will turn us slowly towards peace, a peace we may not understand but one that opens us to new meaning, inviting us home thus back to our true selves.

In this installation, Valdez presents a series of figurative sculptures and drawings honoring the emotions, the home, the heart, immigration, and, ultimately, confronting difficult situations in the search for happiness. It ranges through themes and issues that originate in personal and cultural identity.

Our lives are like a stream, our experience flows through time with periodic cycles of tranquility, disturbance, and integration. Everything flows out and in. We are like the streams containing our life energy finding balance and finally peace.

See Urbano Project for more information.

The word cuore means heart in Italian. It refers to our inner orientation, the core of out being. It is the center the soul of the individual.

In this exhibition Valdez searches through a series of figurative sculptures and drawings honoring the heart, the emotions, the home, and ultimately happiness. It ranges through themes and issues that depart from personal and cultural identity.

Valdez was the director, curator and participant of Visiones/Visions, an exchange between North America and South America. This project brings together artists from the United States and Peru. It was created to exchange ideas, feelings and artistic visions. Ten artists from Peru participated and fifteen from the United States from the Boston Sculptors Gallery from Boston. Valdez created for this show Carry on/Continuando that was approx.7 feet tall using wood and stone. She was inspired by the love and struggle of the working women in Peru.

Valdez presents new work within a recurring theme of how our life is affected in our daily journey. The immigrant experience takes notion of a life journey through time and further complicates it with an actual physical journey through space.

The paradox of a nomadic, or itinerant, stone carver is that while feelings of rootlessness, transience and impermanence swirl about her, she uses one of the most permanent media available to an artist. She seeks to mark a path, perhaps of return, perhaps for future voyagers.

In the installation Valdez searches through a series of figurative sculptures that act as maps touching on a range of themes and issues: personal and cultural identity, loss and memory, motherhood and family, sexuality and love. The pieces appear as in a labyrinth of truncated paths between the place where she was born and all the places and countries related to her. This piece is a continuation of the work Walking with Memories.

Valdez was working on this project and was fascinated by the way people see a paper bag and all the questions that come into their minds when you perceive them… Who does the paper bag belong to? What is inside it? As paper bags are a part of us and our daily lives of our baggage style of living in this fast throw away society…

Walking with Memories a series of work that deals with issues of who she is, where she come from, motherhood, lost love, family and being alone.

Valdez grew up in Argentina, lived in Brazil, Italy and Spain before I came to The United States. She feels she keep carrying her luggage or baggage all the time.

In this body of work Valdez continues the theme of home, migrant women and their journey, dragging their homes and belongings like Sisyphus from one perch to the next.