Artist Talk / Current Space / September 2021

I want to start off by sharing with you my running mantra.

“It’s not how fast you are but about not giving up.”

I’m sharing this with you because it’s new to me. Not necessarily the running part but the mantra. As a kid and a teenager I never did much. I didn’t participate in any school activities like sports or even academics, I really had a hard time committing to much of anything. I just watched others do things -- play music, sports, perform on stage, tell jokes in front of a group. I watched my family talk and act too, always feeling like a fly on the wall.

I still really enjoy observing my environment deeply. I don’t love to be up here in front of you but I'm working on this.

Back in 2012 I started running, mostly to save myself from myself. And every time I’d stop and pick it back up again, it was the same thing. I felt like I was running to save myself from getting eaten by a wild animal. But now, I run with calmness. I run to build endurance. So I say to myself when I get tired or I stop to walk, “It’s not how fast you are but about not giving up.”

And now you’re thinking, I thought this was an artist talk.

Even when I'm not making art. Even when I don't have anything materialized I still consider myself to be making art. More importantly, my running mantra reminds me that every day is different and that what you tell yourself is extremely powerful. Some days I'm quick and feel like I can keep running forever, other days I'm slow and feel like stopping frequently. In my life, so far, there have been moments that i’ve crawled, shit, even times that i’ve dragged myself from thing to thing just to get through the day. Because grief is like that. You can’t run from it, you gotta go through it, or in my case sometimes drag yourself through it because if not you will get eaten alive. But the point is to keep moving no matter how slow you are. To not give up.

This running and life mantra is also my art making mantra. There’s been times where I didn't make art for years, feeling burnt out. I realize when I feel like that it’s because I need to learn something new, maybe even learn how to take a damn nap, and that taking breaks is just part of the process.

From the age of 16 - 23 I took photographs… rather obsessively. I worked in photo labs that whole time too. I learned to look at a color photograph and know if it needed two shades of magenta added or one shade of cyan removed. I learned that when most people go to a tourist city you can’t tell the difference between one family’s photos and another. That tourism looks the same from photo to photo. I learned that people want to freeze life so they don’t forget it.

But what really brought me to photography and really caring about anything in school was the darkroom. The magic in making a film image and transferring it to photo paper was a trick I felt like I could do over and over again. And that’s exactly how I felt when I dyed with plants for the first time. The manifestation of an image to that of color extracted from a plant onto fabric is a magic act that feels so similar to being born and living in a body. Maybe that sounds cheesy but damn, it doesn't cease to continuously amaze me. To know that a plant’s color changes through its lifetime is not dissimilar to us animals. If you pick a plant toward the end of its life cycle you will get a lighter color than if you pick it at the very beginning. Life is just like that, isn’t it? Everything reaches a point of exhaustion.  

I’d already made a couple of quilts before dyeing with plants but once I started learning plant and food waste dyeing, it transformed my practice completely. I also wanted to treat the long tradition of quilting with respect but once I felt like I’d learned and respected its history for a few years, It was time to break some rules. I wanted to get conceptual. Conceptual is something that comes natural to me, it's the way I think almost daily. I can’t read or watch something without having the desire to want to translate its effect on me physically and emotionally. I’m deeply inspired by music and lyrics as well as literature. Sometimes I have these fits of mania that make me feel like I live in a matrix because I have a hundred moments of synchronicity happening but then it’ll ease up and my idea for a piece remains full of connections and references.

The work you see in this exhibition with Meg, are from two parts of my life. The quilts hanging in the gallery are part of a series of quilts I made in 2019 -- called Soft Body; there are only four of the six pieces from that series here. Each quilt has its own story that I could go into length about but I don't care to do that right now. The title for each is important. The way you can see its guts (the batting - which is the fluffy center for warmth) is intentional, threads dangling, the colors which are all made with plant dyes, and the shapes are all important.

During this time I was listening to Ocean Vuong’s book On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, as well as Besser Van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score - on how trauma lives and manifests in the body.

My most recent work with the paper mache tear drops, the storefront window installation, pinata, and the saddest songs in the world mix are from this past year. HOW CAN THEY SLEEP AT NIGHT is the window installation--a title taken directly from the lyrics of a NOFX song called Perfect Government. NOFX is a pop punk band from southern california that one of my brothers and I loved as teenagers-- a lot of my core values come from punk culture. I learned about choosing love and community over power and money… I learned about food not bombs, animal and human rights, equal rights and all the antis:

anti-sexism, capitalism, consumerism, racism, homophobia and transphobia.

Punk rock taught me that war and hate came from greed, fear and bigotry.

And I have to tell you that type of education was fucking free. I feel pretty lucky now, that it was part of my upbringing. But I do have to say, that not even that long ago, I was really beating myself up for “wasting” my time going to clubs, watching bands, buying records and zines and not ever caring about school. It felt like I woke up one day and looked around and realized everyone I knew remembered to get a career. But now I tell myself that I needed to do it the way I did it because I wanted to build my community, because It’s what I value the most. So now I wake up and tell myself I am where I am because I designed my life this way. And that’s the true story. Everything else was a result of living in a capitalistic society.

This past winter I was deeply depressed and having a hard time sleeping and I would think, how does Trump go to sleep at night? How does Jeff Bezos sleep at night? I’m not joking. I thought about they’re whole bedtime routine… like do they sleep alone, do they like to cuddle with their significant others, do they drink sleepy time tea, or do they have to take sleeping pills? Because I have close to no power nor money in comparison to them and I was having trouble sleeping. I thought, this isn’t right. Is it because they are comfortable in the story they tell themselves, that what they do is making the world a better place?

They must not see the world crying. They choose to be self involved rather than trying to live collectively.

If punk rock and making art has taught me anything, it’s that nothing is done alone. That community and practicing empathy is more important than money and power. So, I don’t hate people like Trump, rather, I feel  sorry for humans like him because they are so far from self actualization and that is a damn shame for them.

The paper mache tear drops made out of last year's news evolved after recently showing my daughter how to make a paper mache mask. I had collected stacks of NY Times that were not being collected last year by the school, whose faculty housing I live in. When I pulled them out to cover our table for a paper mache project with my daughter--the headlines combined with a sense of touch, along with a childhood memory ignited some ideas.

Once I was in the process of making the teardrops I thought about making a pinata that could be collectively smashed. As a child I grew up between Mexico City and Houston, TX - my mom being from Mexico we visited there often. We smash pinatas for new years and birthdays and  the concept of blind folding someone and spinning them around a few times before setting them off to hit a moving target filled with treasures is a beautiful metaphor for life. I chose to fill it with dried marigolds and Mexican candy. Marigolds are used in the Day of the Dead, a celebration that takes place the first weekend of November. A weekend long celebration filled with food, dancing and celebrating with the deceased--who come back through the lighted path of marigolds to be with the land of the living. If you open up a dried marigold head a hundred seeds will spill out. You can simply plant the head to grow your own garden full of light.

This idea made me think of the quote,

“They tried to bury us, but they did not know we were seeds.”

In Mexico, Zapatistas have been using this saying in protests for decades and it resurfaced in 2014 when 43 students went missing in the western Guerrero state of mexico- most of whom have still not been found. In recent protests in America for Black Lives Matter this saying, which originated from Greek post-war poet Dinos Christianopoulos - a gay novelsit, folklorist, and researcher who never came out publicly originally wrote,

“What didn’t you do to bury me but you forgot I was a seed.”

I feel like our collective experience with the pandemic is a gift to remind us how connected we all are. That even our collective grief is one we can celebrate together. So I made the pinata to symbolize this experience. We must mourn, celebrate and move on.

The opening took place on September 11th which was intentional on my part-- thankfully, Meg and Current Space did not mind. Not only is this a collective American tragedy but the following year my dad passed away in his rocking chair while watching the one year memorial on television. So for me, this exhibition is a dedication to him and everyone who lost loved ones 20 years ago.

I think the most important thing for me to share with you is that quilting and plant dyeing not only brought new life into my art practice but it transformed my everyday being. It’s taught me way more than what you see. It’s taught me how to organize my feelings, thoughts and actions on a day to day basis, which is huge for someone who has ADHD and quite a bit of family trauma. The construction of a quilt taught me that if I put in a little every day that one day I'll have this beautiful object that represents way more than what you see. Because oftentimes the process…. the walking, the crawling, and even the dragging is way more important in the journey of self actualization than getting to the finish line the fastest and the fanciest.