www.robbinbates.com

hazel batrezchavez (b. 1994, Shelby, Ohio/Shawnee Territory) (they/them)

www.hazelbatrezchavez.net/

Instagram: @hazelbatrezchavez_ 

“In the Waiting Room” (2017–20) is an exhibition that bears witness to the places where individuals are asked to perform their identity. In highlighting microaggressions faced by someone who is racialized in crossing borders, inverting practices of authority, and focusing on the historical violence of language, “In the Waiting Room” draws parallels between the United States’ southern border, police brutality, and the institution as systems of oppression that take up space and silence certain humans. The work is built as a reaction to the current cultural landscape; the artist navigates and moves freely between written word, large-scale sculpture, textiles, performance, and video installation. 

“In the Waiting Room Poem” was intended to be performed at the opening of the MFA Thesis show “In The Waiting Room” at the Sanitary Tortilla Factory in Downtown Albuquerque, NM. In light of circumstances, a video-performance piece was created with footage, sounds, and previous performances that came to influence this body of work. 

Sometimes when you sleep you look so ancient is an installation that takes place as a speculative moment where the ancient past and deep future seek synchronistic relationship and materialize within an elusive present. Building off the idea that the past is not closed, but open, and that the art/artist may function as that conduit, this installation functions as a mythical ecosystem. A consistent slow drumming echoes through the void of the central fiberglass sculpture, in ceremonial rhythm, suggesting that something is about to happen. The drawings on the walls trace the possibility of that moment, revealing other realms.

I am interested in an edge between worlds, portals, which could dissolve or emerge simultaneously, and how sculpture may act as a sort of rupture. The afterlife process—in-between moments such as those between wake and sleep—inspire the work in hope to transcend psychological conditioning. Sometimes when you sleep you look so ancient explores how the various forms of consciousness human/non-human artificial/natural may coexist in time and space.

As a teenager, I stumbled upon the Furry community—an internet-based social identity culture wherein participants create and interact through anthropomorphized animal characters. While my involvement in this community began as a personal venture for self-exploration and socializing, I now consider my identification within Furry culture as an essential means for critiquing contemporary notions regarding subjectivity, sexuality, and relationships to so-called nature, technology, and reality.

My fursona, Atmus, a white-tailed deer, acts as my stand-in and muse in my artworks. My thesis exhibition, “Real Problems,” came out of a fascination with portraying him in scenes of peril or faux violence. Atmus is both a-part-of and apart-from me; enacting these morbid fantasies feels like catharsis for my anxieties about the precarity that my generation lives with daily. As threats of societal obliteration compound, artwork and fantasy seem necessary mechanisms for enduring the weight of our constant catastrophes.

Kristen Geary uses drawing, installation, text, and performance to explore relationships within systems of neocolonial exchange. Her most recent work addresses the journeys of tropical fruit imported to the United States: pineapple as reckoning, longing, and language. This pen and ink drawing is from a series called “Landscapes.” When she first drew this small series, Geary hoped to evoke the global import systems that supply much of our food in the United States today, providing us with products from places and people we often know very little about while simultaneously disconnecting us from the place we live. What she realized after drawing these was how deeply the fantasies of Manifest Destiny are embedded in her psyche.

www.kristengeary.com

Over the past two years, Erin Louise Gould’s art practice has centered on the Kentucky coffeetree and its peculiar history. The tree, now common as an urban shade tree, is considered an evolutionary anachronism, a species that evolved to live in another time. “All That I Have” is an exhibition of printmaking, sculpture, video, writing, and found object installation that tells this intertwined story of life, loss, and multi-species resilience. Living with a chronic and painful autoimmune disease and surviving a decade-long eating disorder, Gould’s art practice has addressed issues relating to the body and its idiosyncrasies, desires, and seeming contradictions. In her newest body of work, Gould gradually unearths the story of the Kentucky coffeetree while interweaving her own.

www.erinlouisegould.com

*nicholas b jacobsen, I' M P U R E (deeds), 2019, video, six minutes 43 seconds.

I am an artist and researcher working to unsettle my foundational assumptions about the natural world and my place within it. I connect these assumptions to ideas about the supposed naturalness of human exceptionalism, masculinity, white supremacy, and capitalism—the foundations of US culture. This work emerges as an entanglement of installation, performance, video, text, and digital collage. My research is slow, embodied, and place-based, emphasizing the time and attention it takes to develop a lasting, visceral understanding of something. Through my work I want others to come away with a multisensorial curiosity about themselves and the multiplicitous world that is submerged within. My current work is a reckoning at the intersection of Whiteness, Mormonism, and settler-coloniality through my personal and ancestral history.

I paint depictions of landscapes to understand and spend time with past and present traumas. Imagined landscapes become mindscapes of lived displacement, longing, misunderstanding, wonder, love, and loss. These imagined landscapes become representations of the body and mind, difficult to maneuver and overwhelming. The flora and objects in the work simultaneously appear to be dissolving and growing out of the environment in which they are painted. I want to give those who see my paintings a sensation of the sublime and the mystical but also convey a corporeal narrative.

I’m fascinated with reframing the familiar in order to reimagine the connections and boundaries between individuals, communities, and the larger systems in which we live. By combining disparate elements in an assemblage, I suggest a story about how these objects are interrelated, with the hope of opening windows to new relationships. Much of my work sprouts at the interstices of nature, refuse, memory, sustainability, and the sacred. My aim is to offer liminal spaces, to produce cracks, kinks, and refractions in quotidian reality, thus inviting the viewer to let in the unfamiliar in order to meet our inner and outer worlds anew.

www.edenradfarr.com

This cement slab is a remnant of a discarded cardboard box, one that had been abandoned after being used as a bed by somebody sleeping outside. Corrugated cardboard is ubiquitous because it is cheap and disposable, created for the sole purpose of containing value without being of value. Once it is exhausted of its usefulness, it is left to the elements. Insidiously, this is also how unregulated hardline capitalist economies tend to treat people, whether their agents intend to or not. 

Concrete is made to be disregarded. It is meant to be walked on, not looked at. It is made to be spat on, not loved. It is expected to conform in its softness, and remain in its hardness. It is intended to be passed over, not dwelled upon: “Move along, nothing to see here.”

“There is an impossibility that exists with my paintings. They never do what I want them to. But, despite knowing this, I paint anyway. Again and Again. Knowing that within the humanity of a mark there is inherent failure. And yet, wholly necessary. I’m not defeated by painting but I should be.”

Amy Traylor is a creative technologist who uses computer programming to reimagine alternative pasts and postulate new technological futures. In ads from the ’60s and ’70s, seductive women in evening gowns recline in new age kitchens with ovens and refrigerators that promised to remake their lives, to liberate, to seduce, to help the housewife fulfill the multiple expectations of her family. The exhibit, “Making House,” is a generative multimedia installation that asks the question: What would have happened, what might be different now, if advertisers had decided that computers were the essential appliances of the successful homemaker?

Inspired by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s 1972 work Womanhouse, “Making House” includes a virtual reality world created by writing custom software in the Processing computer programming language. Still images were then printed as pillow cushions, T-shirts, metal wall hangings, and custom fabric that was then sewn into baby quilts.

www.amytraylor.com

La Eterna Resistencia, 2020

Statement by David Saiz:

“... Martín Wannam’s MFA thesis exhibition, La Eterna Resistencia, presents a visually stimulating and dynamic exploration of mediums utilized to challenge the artist’s politically and religiously conservative homeland. In challenging Guatemala’s heteronormative, patriarchal, classist, and religious social hierarchies, Wannam engages in counterdiscourse through appropriation and deconstruction of national and cultural symbols that edify the country’s mythos. The Guatemalan people have a 300-year-long resistance to the authoritarian violence that has historically been inflicted by Spanish conquest and today maintained by political leaders and U.S. intervention. As part of the “Northern Triangle,” which includes El Salvador and Honduras, Guatemala is one of the most dangerous countries south of the US-Mexico border. As reported in the 2018 data reports of three human rights organizations (Kids in Need of Defense, Latin America Working Group, and Women’s Refugee Commission), sexual and gender-based violence “by gangs and organized criminal groups, hate crimes, and abuse by authorities, [forces] many LGBT[Q] individuals to migrate in search of safety,” with many violent crimes unreported due to fear of reprisal or further discrimination by authority figures.[i]Wannam, having grown up in Guatemala, as a queer person of color in a working-class and Catholic family, is aware of the many ways that social institutions have marked queer and brown bodies as disposable, valueless, and degenerate. Extracting visual iconography from everyday items, as seen in the artist’s public and private life, such as his use of flags, piñatas, religious icons, bananas, and the brown body, the systems of coloniality referenced by these symbols are critically exposed. Wannam’s work dissects the signifying power that these symbols hold in sustaining ideologies of racism, sexism, and heterosexism while simultaneously exposing the corruption and fragility behind the nation’s systems of orthodoxy.”

www.martinwannam.com

Grasslands establish themselves in times and places of uncertainty and disturbance. The series “12^th and Tijeras (Waxing Crescent to Waxing Crescent)” emerges from attempts to learn from the everyday resilience of the grasslands entangled with urban human life. Each dossier shows a drawing completed during a month of visits to a drylands grass plant growing untended at a busy city intersection. The drawings represent a personal data set of attempts to learn from the gestures of this plant. Layered underneath are other knowledge systems which intersect with grasses, including plant perspective (the sky as seen from plant vantage point during each drawing); animal perspective (wool felt, a sheep technology built on grass); and western scientific perspective (pages from a found manuscript categorizing arid grasses). Viewers can lift and sift through each perspective in the dossiers, examining which knowledge systems are helpful to them, what should be added, and what removed.

www.jessicazeglin.com