Installations (Art)

Dirt, Rust, and Non-Girl Stuff explores identity, mental health, and tradition. Considering the customs of my Cuban heritage, I choose materials and processes that reflect conventions related to gender identity, expression, and craft. These subjects are represented via assemblages that exist as stand-alone sculptures and installations. Each piece is composed of materials and objects chosen based on their physical characteristics and associations to craft or notions of traditional gender norms. The work hints to the viewer through metaphors created by material choice, found object associations, and the placement of each element. Each fragment of material represents a part of my identity. The porcelain acts as a metaphor for my body, often breaking, cracking, and shattering. Its fragility requires mending, stitching, and repair to become something or someone else. The crochet elements reference the women's gender roles and femininity that my parents yearned for me to exhibit. The metal tools and rusted objects are representative of the more masculine roles I took on to fulfill my father's need for a son. The work often exhibits the precarity, the needed repairs, or additions of femininity to the otherwise masculine materials to turn a too masculine body into a more feminine one. The arrangements are not motivated by order or beauty but by the tension caused by the divide between who I am and whom I am expected to be.

Temporal Displacement is an investigation of loss and the recollection of memories translated through tangible objects and their placement in relationship to one another. The objects are primarily slip-cast terracotta ceramic dog-like heads with fabric bodies crafted as puppet-like forms, which are both stationary and suspended. Additional elements include a Mechanical Dog that the viewer activates with a hand-held crank; muslin fabric printed with hand-made ceramic stamps, and a curtain. The ceramic stamps are incised with a version of the puppets playing the game of jacks. The installation is within a three-walled room that invites viewers into a liminal time-space and experience, then leads them out again.

Not long ago, Venezuela was considered the wealthiest in Latin America. Today, Human Rights Watch estimates that 2.3 million Venezuelan refugees are scattered through the Americas. Imagine having to leave your home with just a few possessions. The world is currently witnessing a wave of mass migration, with nearly 65 million people being displaced because of war or persecution, and an even higher number migrating from poverty. This thesis uses design to visually articulate the personal narratives surrounding the struggles of flight and the significance of emotion to the debate on migrant identity, acculturation, and the perception of being the other, focusing on the current displacement crisis in Venezuela. The visual message making process of graphic design is used as a catalyst for social good with the intent to create a conversation and generate an experience and that promotes advocacy.

My thesis body of work offers a bridge into the physical, emotional, and spiritual
scarring caused by global intolerance towards the LGBTQIA+ community and
oppression embedded by patriarchal power. This body of work is a collection of
resurfaced history and experiences transformed physically by intentionally subverting
hyper-masculine materials into knots. My objective is to deconstruct individual knotted
cords that make up the fabric of my identity and reconstruct them into an installation.
Renascence offers a visceral experience for the audience that aesthetically explores the
body’s transformation as it heals. This thesis asserts a place within a reflective, fluid,
transitional identity expressing the intersection of the temporality and body that I occupy
as a Queer, Latinx artist of color. Working across media, Renascence incorporates
performance, photography, paper, paint, projection, mirrors and built environments.

Ardent Dwellings is a work about longing, self-exploration, and construction of identity through the arrangement of meticulously drawn and cut paper elements. Mainly consisting of drawn dried flower forms and expressive female hands, these elements come together in deliberate arrangements of spaces and relations. The moments of sensuality resulting from these exploratory touches signify moments created through traversing bodies and identities. To achieve this exploration visually, I created a collection of eight drawing collages and a large paper installation with mixed media components. The elements in this work are carefully placed in relation to one another with the intent of constructing an abstract narrative exploring the who, how, and the why of the self—specifically the queer self and the search for belonging that accompanies the discovery of this identity.

Power of Wrapping explores and communicates the somaesthetically inspired artistic act of wrapping as a generative force for healing. This thesis exhibition is an installation of artwork comprised of the combined forms and outcomes from two types of investigation. One, a studio practice in which my own somatic engagement, collaborates with my personal aesthetics of form, to produce two kinds of exhibited work. The first is a large traditionally wrapped Japanese temari and the second, involves twenty low-relief two dimensional wrappings on eight-inch stretcher frames and configured in a circular pattern with a larger wrapped stretcher frame in the center. Two, a social practice which embodies relationally and somaesthetically inspired art making within community groups, as generators of a large hanging form of wrapped hula hoops. In its totality, the installation is an expression of the idea that the body is essential to both making art and experiencing art.

Informed by my training in the physical sciences, my thesis show presents results of research on the elements of line and dramatic staging. My process is documented through the experimental grounds of my sketchbooks. Originating from observational drawings of organic forms, my fascination with line quality and my desire for theatrical settings propelled these drawings to acquire a three dimensional presence. Through constructed book formats, staged micro-scenes, and photographs, I test my extracted, abstract forms in varying intimate environments. I control these worlds through scale, space and lighting, and I observe and record how they behave. I gather data through a methodical process that is infused with the empirical instincts I developed as a scientist. I express the resulting distilled organic forms in the most theatrical way I can invent.