Edison Peñafiel’s first NFT mirrors his journey as an immigrant and artist

For Edison Peñafiel, his first NFT reflects his journey as both an immigrant and an artist. Through photography, video art and mixed-media installation, he often depicts migrants who are caught in a loop, eternally traveling without ever arriving.

The NFT is an extension of the video installations for which he’s best known. Shot in black and white, all feature cartoonishly flat sets deliberately stripped of details that might suggest time or place, with costumes and props that elude identification. Peñafiel also avoids easy emotional cues, capturing the intensity of the experience while sidestepping the melodrama that often accompanies such retellings. By replacing politics with poetry, the 37-year-old artist explores migration not as a news headline, but as a fundamental feature of the human condition.

Like so many who live in South Florida, Peñafiel’s family came from Latin America in search of a better life. By the time he arrived at Broward’s Plantation High from Ecuador at age 16, he already had a background in music and art, thanks to two older sisters (graphic designers who taught him draftsmanship) and his cousins (rockers who taught him about Metallica). He spent a five-year break from college playing in metal bands and working at a DirectTV call center, then enrolled in art history at Florida International University, with a focus on photography. There he met the professor who would become his mentor, who pushed him to get a foot in the art world by producing exhibition-ready work while still an undergraduate.

Where some people view the camera as a means to document reality, Peñafiel wanted to build his own world on the other side of the lens. His first project, “Barrio Alto” (“Uptown”) is a series of black-and-white photos of miniature cities he built with cardboard. The crooked skyscrapers and noir-ish shadows are a nod to one of his earliest influences: German expressionism, the early 20th-century film style characterized by dream-like imagery and dramatic silhouettes.

The experience helped him see the camera as one instrument to be used in conjunction with others. “Now, when I do installation, there’s a camera. When I do painting, there’s a camera,” Peñafiel explained. “Ever since my first project, I’ve been interested in creating this constructed reality and using the camera to capture it in a way that’s actually quite surreal, even if it’s tied to real-life events.”

READ MORE: About the Miami Herald Collection

But he could only go so far with still imagery, Peñafiel realized. So he started producing video installations like “Ni Aquí, Ni Allá” (“Neither Here Nor There”), which won him the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art in 2019. In a video projected on one wall of a darkened gallery, five nondescript figures drag towering bundles of luggage behind them with ropes. Their suitcases and trunks are very much three-dimensional, however, with the ropes attached in such a way that they appear to emerge from the screen into the gallery. The effect of the piece is simple and elegant, driving home the futility of these immigrants’ efforts and the weight that renders them immobile. He attributes his taste for the understated to his favorite writer, the Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti, whose unfussy language inspired Peñafiel to “get straight to the point, with no unnecessary decorations.”

For many such video works, Peñafiel personally plays every role. Ones that involve repetitive movements like walking or jumping in place can be surprisingly exhausting, “like doing push-ups for 10 minutes at a time,” he said. His most recent video project, “Mare Magnvm,” currently on view at Sabrina Amrani Gallery in Madrid, is an immersive multi-channel projection that depicts animated rafts full of real-life humans drifting in a paper collage sea. To film this, Peñafiel had to switch costumes for each of the 81 characters in the piece, then stand in front of a green screen and rock left to right for 10 minutes each as if on a boat in choppy water.

Despite the similarities with ongoing refugee crises, these works are more than references to current events. They instill an abstract sense of dislocation with which we can all identify to some extent.

“His work has a way of being applicable to many kinds of migration experiences,” said René Morales, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Morales was chief curator at Miami’s Pérez Art Museum when he first met Peñafiel, and was impressed by his ability to convey this experience with such a tight visual economy. “Formally, his work really has a way of amplifying the emotional dimensions of the subject matter he’s dealing with. How that happens, I don’t know. That’s part of the mystery of art making, of how visual experience amplifies emotional experience. And Edison has a very strong grasp on that.”

That grasp has earned Peñafiel numerous residencies and grants from arts organizations across the country, include two residencies with Miami’s Oolite Arts and Oolite’s 2021 Creator Award. Oolite is collaborating with the Miami Herald on the Miami Herald Collection of NFTs by local artists, with prices starting at $100. His regular works start at $2,000 and up.

Since NFTs entered the wider art world last year, Peñafiel has been bugging his gallerist to let him make one. Though NFTs are technically any object tagged to a one-of-a-kind digital certificate, they’ve often taken the form of short animations, like GIFs, so his work is naturally suited to the format. The Miami Herald Collection will be his first time minting one. The idea of an endless loop also fits with his interest in the way history repeats itself. “These kinds of situations we’re talking about,” he said, “they’ve always been happening, they’re still happening and will always continue to happen. It’s a recurring event.”

AT A GLANCE

In progress: An ambitious six-channel video installation that will require viewers to follow along by navigating the space of the gallery; it later will be edited into a short narrative film and a collection of animated NFTs.

Miami Herald Collection: Launches April 22 at nft.miamiherald.com; sign-up opens April 1.

Website: edisonpenafiel.com

This story was originally published April 4, 2022 at 7:00 AM.