Media typically portrays Latinx people under a limited viewpoint of stereotypes and tropes as imagined by a person outside of the community. These vague, generic, and oftentimes damaging interpretations leave out layers of complexity and truth. Socorro (2015-present) is an ongoing project that documents the artist’s grandmother Socorro, a first generation Mexican American, in her home in Milpitas, CA. Socorro lived a full life of love, hardship, pain, joy, and faith. She is the embodiment of strength, love, and family. Socorro and her husband Manuel raised a family of 5, have 7 grandchildren, and 6 and counting great grandchildren. Manuel passed away in 2010 leaving Socorro to live alone in their family home. Socorro has been the backbone and matriarch of the family for decades, but as she ages, she can no longer take on that role in the same way.
Socorro focuses on the last chapters of her life as an elderly woman who faces many health challenges from the perspective of her granddaughter. The images record this transitionary time, shift of energy, and the details of her daily life. Socorro’s home is no longer the place where family frequently comes and goes, meeting for menudo or tamales, birthdays and holidays. It is now a place where Socorro moves along slowly and quietly watching her novelas and news. It is a peaceful home full of memories of joy, love, care, and loss. Socorro is an honest, multifaceted love letter and thank you to the artist’s grandmother and the ancestors who have been erased and forgotten. Gracias para todo.
Media typically portrays Latinx people under a limited viewpoint of stereotypes and tropes as imagined by a person outside of the community. These vague, generic, and oftentimes damaging interpretations leave out layers of complexity and truth.
The Latinx American community is not a monolith. We come from a range of countries, speak different languages, have distinctive physical characteristics, hold various traditions, and have diverse interests, goals, and lives. Latinx Series is an ongoing project that documents Latinx people from a Latinx American perspective. A series of environmental portraits show the individuals photographed in a location and clothing they felt represented them, giving them agency over their image. These photographs show the wide complexity, range, and depth of Latinx Americans in our current and ever evolving socio-political climate.
The story and ideals of colonization are insidiously ingrained and normalized in most Americans on a deeply subconscious level. As a Latinx person, I recognize that there are immense amounts of racism, colorism, and anti-Blackness within our own marginalized community that are in part a result of colonization of the Americas. After years of research and practice around decolonization and antiracism, reading buried histories of women, queers, and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), revising academic pedagogy and curriculum, I was ready to sit down and reflect on the pain and trauma of my own lived experiences. In the spring of 2020, I began to reflect more deeply on my own complicity and internalized ideas of white supremacy and anti-Blackness and how to eradicate them. Self Decolonization is an installation that documents a performance of myself facing and removing a mask of my own internalized white supremacy. A mask that I hadn’t realized allowed me to “pass” in various aspects of my life and profit from anti-Blackness. Removing the mask is the beginning of the extensive, tedious, and painful self-reflective process of decolonization. Confronting internalized prejudice, bias, and colonial values is one necessary step in achieving true racial justice and equality.
For at least 30 minutes everyday, over the course of 30 days, she ran. Beginning from the same location, each day a new route was explored—north, east, south, west. The duration was dependent on her physical and mental strength that day, that moment. Unique hand-stitched maps plotted the daily journey and photographs documented her body’s reaction; sweat.
The Involuntary Response photographic series investigates the body in both surface and function to scrutinize social perceptions of gender and femininity. Responding to the adage ‘a lady never breaks a sweat’ and the social stigma attached, the works serve as a quiet but firm confrontation to the male gaze. The series documents the involuntary response and bodily function of sweating and skin flushing due to strenuous physical activity. The body's natural responses of the heart beating, breathing and blood circulation are all involuntary reactions that the body sustains to remain functional. From the photographs, viewers are able to experience a visceral reaction to the body's involuntary response of sweating that both men and women endure through a variety of physical and mental activity. The series works to contest the antiquated notions of how women are presumed to be, by depicting a woman who is sweating and flushed with nothing between her and the camera.
Hand stitched maps of each days route explore the delicate and piercing complexities of being a woman and taking up space in a society where women are taught to be small and easily digestible.
In California, July tends to be the hottest month of the year. The kind of heat where it can be uncomfortable to exist.
Nothing was Ever the Sameis a photographic series comprised of digital collage and manipulation where each collage is a diary of the day. Every day in the month of July 2018 I attempted to simultaneously work through and escape the concerns that were bubbling up in my life. The issues that were causing me to be overrun with anxiety and depression. The problems that had made it uncomfortable to exist.
These diary entries are unrelated but somehow interconnected to one another. The daily photos often referenced geographical locations, self portraits, and random things that felt like treasures of the banal. Collaging the photos removes the sense that the photograph is a document and opens up the image to abstraction and surrealism, allowing for entirely new scenes to be created.
Nothing was Ever the Same looks into the subconscious and coping to show that nothing is ever quite as it seems.
All That Remains examines the biological phenomenon of insomnia and its mental and physical effects on the body. The work is a documentation and interpretation of chronic insomnia that the artist endured over the course of six months. Throughout this time the artist collected her hair that was shed on a daily basis as evidence and a physical manifestation of an internal struggle. Three different approaches were made in the documentation of the occurrence: scientific and detached, psychological and emotional, and narrative.
Shed Illusions documents the experience scientifically by photographing the hair loss accumulated over the course of roughly six months. On a cold white background with individual clumps of hair in the center, each photograph acts as evidence and a portrait of an evening of sleeplessness. The massive grid encapsulates the experience of insomnia as a whole creating a map of time passed.
I Forgot to Remember to Forget continues to use hair as the subject but is reflective of the psychological and emotional effects of insomnia. Sleep studies indicate that the blue and green colors are suggestive of calmness and serenity, prompting peace and tranquility in the viewer but depict the harsh reality of hair loss, unstable mental space, and the effects of insomnia. The photograms are more personal and evocative of the vast emptiness and oblivion or the overactive mental space that occurs in the middle of the night.
After many months of hearing about the huge impending El Niño, with no actual signs of storms, Juliana Rico took action into her own hands. Arming herself with the tools of a citizen journalist- an iPhone and access to social media, Rico began the journey of reporting on El Niño through a durational performance on Instagram. El Niño Watch investigated and followed the predicted El Niño weather phenomenon in Southern California from November 2015 - March 2016. Rico adopted a weather forecaster persona and posted daily video updates to Instagram closely following the weather and El Niño while talking about everything from pop culture to relationships to politics.
The daily posts played off of the main stream medias over sensationalized portrayal of El Niño and the reality of Southern California’s idyllic weather to create a satirical and witty feed. A community of viewers followed along, commented, and reacted in the comments of the posts. El Niño Watch utilized Instagram’s popular motifs: selfies, ridiculous hashtags, and trending topics to create clever content remarking on news, social media and culture on a daily basis.
Follow @el_nino_watch on Instagram for the complete project.
Some works in progress and ways that I have attempted to process the complexities of emotions I have felt throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic from 2020-2021.
The horizon generally has two meanings, literally it references the line that appears between the earth and the sky or the sky and water. The idiom on the horizon means something that is about to happen. The horizon is a space of transition which is neither here nor there, it is not now or later.
on the horizon digitally weaves urban sprawl with natural spaces to create a new seamless mutated landscape. These man made elements blend in or mimic the natural structures of the landscape. The images reference the past through the pristine natural environment, the present with modern cityscape, and an eerie sense of the future by delicately combining the two. The images thrive on the dramatic shift in scale between micro and marco and the relationship between the city elements within the natural landscapes.
The digital medium and its inherent mutability is used to interweave two opposing elements into one new mutated landscape which has a simulacral effect. Some of the integrations are quick to find, while others are less pronounced and become a surprise to the viewer. It is the small intervention of the man made elements which is the punch line or punctum of the new photograph. Every element in the imagery is controlled, and modified if needed, to blend them into one new reality.
on the horizon is a formal and modernist look at natural and urban spaces. The work raises questions of how people have used and developed land in the past and the effects of urbanization on the natural environment in the future.
A gallery of video works.
Please Note:
One Off is a part of the All That Remains Project
Day After Day is a part of the 30/30+ Project