tereza

From the notion of landscape to love for the land, Together, part of the Trash to Art initiative, is a Collaborative Online International Learning project Prof. Francisco Gonzalez Romo de Vivar and I created, turning trash into art. We both embody the theory through our own creative practices as well as expand it to our students. During our COIL we focus on UN Goal #12, Responsible Consumption and Production and #13, Climate Action.

In my images, I reconsider landscape painting in terms of new materiality. Pachuca, Mexico, is the referent, and stands for Francisco’s hometown. I did not grow up in my hometown due to immigration and found the love for this city in Franscisco’s photos palpable. Layers of imagery fuse with the background, altering the colors with every iteration. Photo references for top layers are trash documented during daily swims at Whales Beach, Swampscott, MA. US. I paint on recycled card-stock recipes cooked throughout the pandemic. Professor Romo de Vivar documents his trash through photography and creates a video of land pulsing, breathing, absorbing what seems like endless amounts of trash. A Landscape Is

Things that are hidden in a dark space and then revealed.

From personal experience, I re-title modern and postmodern art changing the meaning.

Painting for (female) pleasure.

In the instability of global climate change, home, what we perceive as a stagnant structure, will be a moveable idea, both in terms of migration but also in the appreciation of the materiality itself. I play with dissolving what one perceives as immovable often referencing art history.

Correcting the wrong thinking. Burned dad’s version of woman, his sculpture. No one is here for another’s use, (abuse.) Everything is here for one’s care, (love.)

Moved by Fautrier's Hostage paintings, I examine the effects of patriarchy on gesture, body language, and expression of the so-called other.

Seeing Ives Klein blue in the quotidian.

Touchstone is a community engagement project in which the artist asks those affected by Covid to email her photos of loved ones they need to hold, either in grief or while in the hospital. In an era in which hundreds of thousands of people are dying, Touchstone reconsiders the processes of death and mourning. Daily news tolls the numbers, which represent something unimaginable. To make the loss tangible and bring Covid death ‘home’, Swanda asks participants to share in the grieving captured by these works, even as we distance physically. For Swanda, the intimacy of painting flips distancing. Of course, surviving Covid in the US may be far easier than surviving the Police and systemic racism: As a collective grieving, Swanda also paints those that have been massacred at the hands of the police and migrants that remain unnamed. This project is part of The 2020 Immigrant Artist Biennial.

Residing in Vasari’s studio in 2017, as part of a rosenclaire workshop, I study darkness, in relation to twenty year old negatives of my mother and complimentary red/green. Stretcher-bars take on the forms of homes and arrows. Colors form relationships. Everything relates to each other and the space.

In Impermanent Resident, I provide two hundred bars of soap for the Fung Wah Biennial.

I question the process of ‘naturalization.’ Each participant erases an engraved word, such as gender, used to identify an individual on a Certificate of Naturalization. Soaps are wrapped in current, twenty-three page application form that asks questions like: "Have you ever been a habitual drunkard?"

Review Here

Project with Anitra Haendel as part of Diane Jacobs' $PEAK OUT.

In She $PEAKS, I take quotes from a handwritten notebook Anitra, and I passed back and forth from 2005 to 2010. I continue our collaboration post Ani's untimely death and aim to redefine death, seeing it not as an end, but as a point in a continuum. 

Review: Catalogue (p.72-75) "A Change is Gonna Come"

In Capital Cleanse, I cast 50 bars of soap 2" in diameter; a box of George Washington's, a box of quarters, (spare change, exchange, change.) I provide soap for public restrooms throughout the US. Twelve dollars and fifty cents represents “bride price” or money exchanged for one girl sold in Nigeria, April 2014 to Boko Haram militants. I plan to multiply the project 219 times representing all the girls sold into sex slavery. 

The project has evolved to an online conversation on economics; an exploration on superficiality in skin tone and its link to privilege; and into portraits of Native Americans, the founding mothers and fathers of America, which will be cast in bronze, made permanent, while over ten thousand George Washington’s, or capital, are made with the intent to be used, to change and disappear. 

Published: "Art for Everyone" Chapter 3.7 Installation and Performance Art

In Othering Alphabet, I move with another, specifically my child and mother. We end being a joint body made of the same material; residual dust, hair, cobwebs, lint, bread crumbs, flour, and threads. All of the material is collected through the “mothering” process of tidying up and exposed within the joint shape. Twenty-six symbols reveal an other alphabet.

Learning the specificity of what it takes to fly the American flag and following all protocols with the institution's permission, I raised the flag with an attachment; a housedress.

Site: Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier, VT 2008