Towards a Practice
- Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
ARTIST STATEMENT
As a child, I had to leave my home in Puerto Rico. Thinking I was entering a world of abundance and prosperity, I was met with a space of imagination. Reality was fragmented, and the lines between nightmares and dreams blurred. My artwork responds to that fragmented reality, bringing forward questions like: Who am I? Where am I from? What is home? Where is belonging?
Identity is not something I discovered. It is something I have had to negotiate, every day, in my body and in my work. I come from two Puerto Rican family lines that sit on opposite ends of a racial world my family has never fully named. Black on one side, white on the other. Not a blend. A split. I grew up carrying both, moving between Puerto Rico and the United States, between my paternal grandmother who raised me in Carolina and the home I was supposed to assimilate into in Dallas, Georgia. Neither ever felt complete.
That incompleteness is my practice. My work grapples with the daily struggles of longing for place, holding heavy, challenging emotions related to feelings of loss and displacement. A lot about the limitations that a system, a colonial imposition, holds on us from returning or even being partially at home. I think a lot about that child who had to leave home, and I give her a place to be heard from both the space of the colonized and the colonizer. Filled with deep sadness and immense rage, that child’s imagination is visualized with vibrant colors yet complicated imagery. Often featuring the pink wooden house of my maternal great-grandmother, Carmen Antonetti, my work considers the construction of place and home. The ancestral foundations, not the nostalgic visions. Masked female figures are accompanied by doodles reminiscent of vejigantes and tropical Edens, icons of Caribbean popular culture. Taking inspiration from Puerto Rican print media and Haitian Voodoo flags to speak to that sense of distance and the displacement I, like many others, have experienced.
My creative process involves mixing sophisticated mediums, like oil paints, with children’s art supplies, such as magic markers, crayons, and inexpensive colored pencils. I also work with my family archive. I consider photographs of people who exist on opposite ends of a racial world my family has never fully named, now pulled from boxes, from envelopes, from the places families hide what they do not discuss. I take these images and I press them into fabric. I stretch that fabric across wood. I paint into and around them. The photograph does not sit behind the painting, protected. It is in it, under pressure, the way memory is always under pressure when you come from a divided place.
Wood, textile, paint, and photograph––each one carrying a different inheritance, each one asking something different of the body that made it. The wood comes from my father’s hands. The textile comes from my paternal grandmother’s practice of sewing, of making something useful out of fabric, of repair. The paint is mine. And the photographs are all of us, flattened into image, pressed into a surface that now has to hold what the family never did. This method emphasizes the survival tactic of maturing while still being a child to highlight the disorienting and disturbing truth of being away from one’s sense of belonging.
Even though she had to leave and has barely returned, that child’s reality continues to unfold. Her imagination, filled with fragments and ghosts, photographs and paintings, constructed an imagined place. Overall, what is our imagination but a version of home?