la mano izquierda: beneath the dress, above the skin | LUX Center for the Arts | Art Gallery, Classes, Summer Camps & Outreach
 

la mano izquierda: beneath the dress, above the skin

la mano izquierda: beneath the dress, above the skin

Reception
01/08/2021 - 5:00pm
January 8th, 2021 to February 26th, 2021
Artist Statement

I am a photographer, an artist, and a storyteller.

 

I tell stories about people like me [queer, brown people].

My work explores the ways in which my body [that queer, brown body] has been imagined – how it exists in institutions of meaning like museums and archives. I create works that reference those institutions to question their perceived authority. By appropriating the language of the masters, and by queering their language through the use of poetry, I aim to create spaces of disidentification that welcome the histories of the margin I aim to tell into existence.

My work relies greatly on segmentivity for I believe it is a concept that speaks directly to the fragmented existence of queer people of color. I aim the viewer to draw their own relationships to and between the different components of a piece. I seek the poetry and significance of different materials and media – I let them be dictated by the ideas I am investigating.

I make art because I want to understand the world around me. That is why my work is so heavily informed by situations of victimization in my country of birth, Colombia. I extrapolate the situations of erasure, exclusion, and misrepresentation of othered bodies in the archive to the figure of the disappeared, that eerie figure that lives in the border between existence and oblivion in Colombia.

I create works that explore the state of in-betweenness prevalent of queerness and the border. I mean the border in its broadest sense. The moment between the clicking of a camera and the impression of the image on its sensor. The time between the occurrence of an event and its posterior narration. The disconcerting experience of living between two cultures.

In this way, my work is also autobiographical in reconstructing and re-imagining moments of my own desire, longing, uncertainty, and vulnerability; often taking form as an archive. As the curator of such assemblages, I cannot ignore that the products of these formed relationships must mirror my own projection of self.

Medium
Photography
Fiber / Textiles
 
 

Upcoming Exhibits

Lincoln Artists Guild
Apr
05
4/5/24 to 4/27/24
May
03
5/3/24 to 6/7/24
Ceramics
Toan Vuong
May
03
5/3/24 to 6/29/24
Print / Paper
LPS Art Mentors
May
03
5/3/24 to 5/29/24
Multimedia

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