Bernadette Negrete

My practice bridges multiple disciplines - personal, political, material. I create sculptural and conceptual assemblages that reference sexuality, relationships, religion, and traditional Mexican ideologies. In many of these works, everyday objects like cardboard and tile undergo subtle and fundamental transformations in order to open up discussions about identity. These changes act as a type of material research, opening our awareness to the spaces between identity and objecthood. I investigate how materials, cultural objects, and ideologies evolve using a wide range of processes (such as screen printing, plaster and poetry). These investigations function as a performance, and the resulting objects act as their translations. These re-contextualised 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 to become these abstracted yet compacted bookmarks of everyday moments. My work walks the line between contemporary and crafty in the same way I do Brown and White culture. It often pretends to be something it is not, cardboard impersonates tile or a pillow pretends to be a balloon. Here, I build a world of torch songs and grease. 

In this world, there is no femininity without labor. The labor of childbirth, 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? 

Negrete1239@gmail.com

Resume/CV