7 - Redefining Meaning: The Interweaving of the Visual and Poetic

Summary

I am a visual artist who creates multimedia work mostly consisting of assemblage, collage, oil painting, and poetry in order to give form, voice, and witness to those whose pain has previously been suffocatingly entombed. My themes involve child sexual abuse and domestic violence, and I explore them through transmedia storytelling inspired by childhood memories, thoughts and perceptions, vintage photographs, and objects, unsettling human interactions, and literature. I interweave visual and written art and often use found objects whose meanings I redefine. Although my work recurrently tells stories of trauma, my intention is not to be shocking or harsh; it is simply to engage viewers and help them understand that which needs to be “heard.” In this way, I take that which was hidden in darkness and reshape it into that which calls out to be seen.

Childhood memories are frequently key elements of my work and are most evident in my collages and assemblages, predominantly through the use of found objects such as drawers, viewers, and boxes, which I typically find in antique shops. I also employ personal nostalgic items and old family photos from my life and that of my parents during our time in Mexico City. My collages and assemblages are created using paper, poetry, and sometimes sound in an effort to draw the audience into a multisensory interaction that provokes thought, emotion, and perhaps action. The work on canvas and paper conveys “memory as layers” through the use of multiple glazes and the overlapping of paper and images.

Because collage lends itself to the fantastical, I work in this medium to produce fantasy-like narratives. By allowing my imagination to run freely, I am able to weave together a visual story – merging characters from vintage photographs and old Western civilization books with organic images from biology and botany textbooks. As with the found objects I use in my assemblages, vintage photographs, and images from old textbooks are removed from their original context, placed in a different context and thereby redefined or recycled to tell a distinct story. In this process, the newly defined visual narrative comes first, and then the written narrative evolves. Such was the case with my oil painting, Spider Princess (Fig. 18):

As a result of a magic spell cast by the Gray Witch, the Spider Princess sprouted from a flower – part spider and part human.