Atlanta/The Cuban artist Wilay Méndez Páez presents The Randomness of the Symbols (The randomness of the symbols), a personal exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA) that explores the relationships between memory, exile, Afro-Cuban identity and the traces that the passage of time leaves on objects and people.
The exhibition brings together sculptures and installations made with recovered materials, especially iron and steel, which the artist transforms into compositions loaded with cultural and spiritual references. Fragments of African, Sumerian and Egyptian symbols appear assembled by welding to build a kind of ancestral alphabet, in which each shape functions as a sign of resistance against oblivion.
Rust, impurities and signs of deterioration are not elements that Méndez Páez tries to hide. On the contrary, they constitute an essential part of his artistic language. In his hands, discarded metals take on a new existence, while their corroded surfaces evoke the wounds of history, the transformation of cities, and the fragility of memory.
The artist establishes a dialogue between these structures and the experiences of displacement, discrimination and marginality.
The artist establishes a dialogue between these structures and the experiences of displacement, discrimination and marginality. The bars, cages and walls appear as metaphors for the physical and symbolic borders that have accompanied the stories of slavery, migration and diaspora. In contrast, ancestral signs represent the persistence of an identity that survives even when its bearers have been separated from their territories of origin.
Born and raised in Cuba, Méndez Páez has resided in Atlanta since 2019. His career includes exhibitions in Havana and other cities on the Island, as well as presentations in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. Between 2020 and 2022 he was an artist in residence at the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, an experience that expanded his research into the connections between black communities in the Caribbean and the American South.
The exhibition is part of MOCA GA’s Working Artist Project 2025-2026 program, curated by David Brenneman, former executive director of the Telfair Museums of Art. Battlefield (2026), a welded recycled metal installation that reaches approximately six meters wide.
The tour also includes a documentary made by brothers David and Matthew Adeboyé, accompanied by poetry and narration by the artist himself, which expands the autobiographical and spiritual dimension of the exhibition.
Complementary activity: on Tuesday, November 10, from 6:30 to 8:30 pm, a meeting with the artist will take place (Artist Talk).
