My art is a bi-cultural and trans-cultural experience. Having grown up in Colombia as the child of a Colombian and a United States citizen and having migrated to the U.S. as a young person, I make art in two languages about the curious and intense experience of migration. My work is about the syncretism and hybridization of cultures and individuals influenced by dominant and subordinate cultural forms that have existed since the conquest and colonization of the Americas, and that gets re-enacted in the migration experience. In my 36-year art practice, I prioritize elevating historical and visual manifestations of culture that have existed in the margins of art history & contemporary art for thousands of years.
I approach making artwork through an eco-feminist, decolonial, and intersectional lens, using personal narratives to explore the structures of colonization and racial identity in contemporary society. I have worked on a variety of projects, most of which are organized in a visual novel, Mestiza dos Veces (“Mestiza two times”)—an ongoing project I began thirteen years ago. Each chapter of this novel focuses on a different conceptual issue, ranging from explorations into the taxonomical cataloguing of the New World to the development of caste systems based on the racial miscegenation in the Americas. I have always had a research element to my creative practice, and have investigated taxonomical reports, American colonial lace samplers, and the impact of trade on colonial art aesthetics. Some of my most significant study occurred while I was an artist in residence at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. There I photographed close to a hundred samples of lace brought to the Americas and created during the colonial period. I also researched and photographed the original watercolors by colonial naturalists such as Mark Catesby and José Celestino Mutis. These investigations led to the conceptualization of the body of work I am currently involved in, as well as exhibitions and artist’s talks.
During the last eight years I have been researching and developing a body of work for my visual novel based on the practice of barniz de Pasto. Barniz de Pasto developed through the intermingling of techniques from pre-dispossession art, Spanish colonial aesthetics, & Asian decorative practices that came together during increased global commerce in the colonial era via the Manila Galleon. My practice is deeply informed by my research. Using the extensive archive I have developed, I can create and re-create hybrid motifs where indigenous geometry can sit next to a Hapsburg double-headed eagle. I create large-scale collages re-interpreting barniz de Pasto by using still-life as my subject matter and have made large-scale collages using Tyvek—an oil-derivative paper that stands in as a metaphor for the continued extraction of land and people—and ink to tell stories of colonization, abundance, and extraction via imagery that is luscious and monumental. Each ornament, animal, and flower that populates my art is researched, copied, painted, cut, and glued evoking barniz de Pasto to represent a historical palimpsest of cultural memory. I create compositions that result in narratives where mythologies are confronted: violent uniformed male figures that shoot at animals and flowers; drones flying over canopies of flora and fauna; contemporary scenes depicting the American political landscape alongside chinoiserie and indigenous vases; etc... Conceptually my intention is layered: I aim to understand colonization, recover knowledge, and create art that engages the viewer with a sense of aesthetic awe. I am creating abody of work that references
ancestral indigenous techniques and iconography to tell a narrative. It is a
narrative that explores the trajectory of time from the colonies until now:
from indigenous discoveries, the arrival of the Spanish, and the introduction
of Asian aesthetics from the Manila Galleon to the last sixty years of turmoil
and the resilience of those who have kept up this practice through the
historical and political changes of the last thousand years. I aim to elevate
the material forms and imagery that are the cultural legacy of Colombia and
create a body of work that celebrates this history while speaking to
contemporary concerns and audiences.
Artist's Statement 2010
Minimalism, and The Pattern and Decoration Movement inspire me. But my aesthetic sensibility is deeply rooted, in the Spanish Moorish tiles that permeate many buildings in Colombia, in the lace depicted in colonial portraits, and in the crochets that women were trained to make at the beginning of the XX century.
I have borrowed from Colombian colonial botanical illustrations, lace samples and depictions of lace from Spanish Colonial painting to examine the invisible paths of cultural memory born from exile. This imagery is a metaphor of the parallels of gender and political power respectively.
In my work I point to the passage between Modernism, patriarchy and what is personal and feminine. I draw the threshold in flux that signifies living with history, and in between cultures and languages.
My recent research deals with the Colonial Botanical Expedition of 1783. This flora is part of the iconic history of Colombia and of my own iconographic cultural archive. I knew it intimately in my youth as it grows freely in the Sabana de Bogotá. The flowers, inspired in colonial art, or in the imported roses that come from Colombia and which I see daily in New York delis; allow me to reflect on the meaning of painting flowers in a contemporary art environment. They are multi-links to definitions of historical and gender identity inside a political hierarchy.
Simultaneously and formally I research drawing and painting, and create a poetic path that marks time and expresses humanity.