My practice bridges multiple disciplines—personal, political, and material. I create sculptures and conceptual assemblages that reference sexuality, feminism, and traditional Mexican ideologies. In many of these works, everyday objects like tile and paper undergo subtle and fundamental transformations in order to open up discussions about identity. These changes act as a type of material research, focusing our awareness on the spaces between identity and objecthood. I investigate how materials, cultural objects, and ideologies evolve using a wide range of processes (such as papermaking, sewing, and poetry). These investigations function as a performance, and the resulting objects act as their interpretation. These re-contextualized objects can then go on to function in a gallery or domestic setting as critiques on culture, reflections on identity, or synonyms for the sentimental.
One of the main inspirations behind my practice is my relationship to my family and the labor they put into building a future out of scraps. In particular, I aim to reveal the way these scraps and their labor have persevered into everyday moments in our lives. I’ve always been drawn to how life becomes translated through objects and human residue like compacted bookmarks of everyday moments. Tortillas, social security cards, birth control, and tile are all metaphors for the way labor consumes the world and how we let it consume us. In this world, time is both a material and a performance.
My work walks the line between contemporary and crafty in the same way I walk between brown and white culture. It often pretends to be something it is not—cardboard impersonates tile or a pillow pretends to be a balloon. In this world, there is no femininity without labor. The labor of childbirth, sex, beauty, a labor of love, to labor means to be working class. The gendered divisions of labor in my family motivate the methods of artistic creation I use. When does craft become art? What crafts will make my grandmother proud and what crafts will she not be able to understand?
And how do I break down the barriers separating labor from love from home?
Negrete1239@gmail.com