Reflection on Two Teachers

During my second semester at Yale, a critic, Karin, came to my studio and said—as she accelerated her speech like ripping-off a band-aid in a single breath—that I used abstraction to avoid the innermost impulses that motivate me as a maker. I was shaken by self-awareness, she had seen my fear so clearly she could name it and state it out loud. Like mirrored moments in reverse, years prior, a former professor had asked me—why paint about war? Do you listen to sad songs when you cry? This question stayed with me, why was I intent on continuing to think about war and the disappeared? Besides the obvious answer that would be personal history. What is the significance of a bone apart from forensic evidence and psychological closure? These questions have come and gone in my practice for years now. Both Karin and my college professor were brave enough to meet me half-way and speak to me as a peer and in doing so, even if not affirmatively, they recognized my inquiry.

I first leaned into abstraction looking for distance, in an instinct to evade I purposely obfuscated what I myself couldn’t catch. I don’t undermine my earlier self-imposed limitations regarding what I now see as a dialectic between figuration and abstraction. This was necessary to develop a growing awareness as an artist. Now, as a teacher, it’s important to me to scaffold the conception of questions through a student’s own capacities for knowledge-making, those that stem from their own perception and reflection.

Painting

Specters are the underpainting in both my canvas, and rubbers. Paper and inkjet transfers are manipulated photos of family, archival material, my fifteen-year-old self, and images that reference US military occupations.  Stretching over dimensional structures, like skeletons that refuse to be rolled away, I want to show barrages of damage as the only *infrastructure* that empires leave behind. I rub the surfaces of paintings with fingertips, removing fiber in a gesture that veils and excavates. Likewise, when I brush rubber, I am indexing an embodiment that is exalted in color, space and scale. Can touch be a relief against forced forgetting––a disobedient affective mark that strokes over joints and awnings in canvas and rubbers, and extends itself to the claw clips and metal threatening to burst through the surface? I yearn for an abstraction that is sentimental, and unapologetic. 

When I started to paint, I was mystified by abstraction, so I thought painting abstractly I’d learn what it is. Now, I realize that my schooling had a predilection for an abstraction that positioned itself against being didactic, and equated figuration to didacticism. It required unlearning to perceive the subtlety in imagemaking that is a continuous dialectic between figuration and abstraction. It took me years to gather the courage to speak about what deeply inspires me. Like a confession, I dealt with the guilt of being a secondary witness. The work I’ve done in the past year feels like a coming of age that involves belying the myths of a heroic mother, romanticized social movements and perceiving a historically contingent girlhood. I realized I experience self-censorship, an internalized state terror. Experimental painting has meant to experiment inwardly, questioning impulses, aversions, and desires. Painting materializes that conflicts I perceive externally reflect conflicts inside me. 

I draw myself because my critique is limited by my positionality and not just the wall or the stretcher bar. I am both irritated and motivated by the categorical stigma that sculptural painting ignites. Beyond the natural questions of volume, flatness, and space, I am invested in how painterly illusion and materiality give way to affective mark-making. My work in rubbers and plastics shows a process that exalts embodiment. In my installations and at large scale I look or I search for bodies that relate to one another, and evoke systems of interdependence. I make stretchers without math, aligning wood to drawings directly and letting the intersections show me the angles.  I value color for its potential as a sign or symbol along with its emotive effect. The transfers in my wall work use material from both my personal archive, the Guatemalan police archive, and my family’s ephemera. The collage starts in Photoshop where I colorize, edit, and digitally draw, paint, and alter archival material and ephemera. This process of removal, covering and editing is reflective of the fragmentation, distortion, and the inexpressible within forms of memory. 

Exhumation

Painting as a ritual implies a materialization of the intangible. This act of creation is not to bring into existence, but rather to realize and to give expression to that which already exists. Similarly, death is a fact, and through rituals of exhumation and inhumation it is known. Hailing from a family that was subject to state terrorism during Guatemala’s dirty war, I find painting analagous to reclaiming meaning through exhumation and inhumation. Sometimes when a person is identified in a mass grave, not all parts of their body are found. In these cases, the family buries only found fragments, sometimes just one bone. The act of exhuming and inhuming in tandem is an abstraction-- scarce remains represent ancestors, and in so doing, memory/history is reclaimed. In my paintings I intensify the fragmentation of memory, which is distorted-- magnified in some parts and contracted in others. Abstracted images come together to trigger an anachronic viewing. I juxtapose images that represent history, body and memory with the reality of our current decaying global ecosystem. This juxtaposition challenges our socially and culturally embedded anthropocentric understanding, which is reflected in the body of paintings’ incongruence.

Deliberate disorder was introduced to mass graves as a military strategy to prevent the identification of the assassinated and disappeared. The aesthetics of the unintelligibility of mass graves are magnified in my paintings. This unintelligibility augments the juxtaposition of memory, body, and pollution in our ecosystem. I deliberately use materials typically found in mass graves that survive the weathering of time and tend to avoid decay in the earth, such as latex, plastic, and polymers in general. I contrast these artificial textures and objects with imagery of flora and fauna. My practice is concerned with rescuing the value of that which is conventionally deemed artificial, and questioning artificiality as a way of separating human species from “nature,” a separation that has been further deepened by the genocide of indigenous peoples, such as the Ixil in Guatemala. 

I see inhumation and painting as ways of resisting a double death, the asssasination of embodied life coupled with the obliteration of memory provoked by clandestinity and disappearance. Disorder and anachronism are reaffirmed in exhumation and burial as distortions of time, where a distant past returns because a future depends on it. The identification and burial of a missing person presents an opportunity to reclaim someone who was violently seized, and imagine a future that is linked to our past. The burial of our ancestors provides continuity and a sense of belonging. I approach painting with an attitude of sober joy, which honors the persistent legacy of the dead or disappeared.