Join us tonight for an art platica with Rebeca Abidail Flores y Samantha Maria Espinoza, whose collaborative show “It Repeats, El Paso Poetico”, is currently on view in our galeria.
Rebeca Abidail Flores is a Salvadoreña and Mexican American artist from Fresno, CA. She has an MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco. Her work is centered on ideas of work and play and how land interacts with culture and community.
Artist Statement; My work is an attempt at a reconciliation between land and work. As a child of an Indigenous—Mixtec mother and a father who came to the U.S. as a refugee from El Salvador, I’ve witnessed the labor that is forced upon our communities regardless of border. Through the use of storytelling and multidimensional work — installation, video, and textile: I attempt at creating meaning out of items found in everyday life that can anchor memory to land. I’m interested in the ways work and play interact with culture and community. More specifically, how art can remain accessible and sustainable.
Samantha Maria Xochitl Espinoza is a Chicana artist coming from a Mexican and Salvadoran family. She grew up in L.A and in Denver, CO and currently resides on Lisjan Ohlone land (Oakland, CA). She references living in between worlds, identities, and homes as a marker of her queer, Chicana experience. Her work reveals her generational and personal history, moments, and traumas as openings for wider conversations on racialized, gendered, and capitalist oppressions. She creates art solely for other brown women to enjoy, and as a gift to her communities in the hopes that they will see parts of themselves reflected or whispered within her work. She is a youth educator, organizer, daughter, sister and falls in love frequently.
ARTIST STATEMENT; Using found fabric and paper that may otherwise be considered scrap, I recreate and reimagine scenes of our racialized realities, the testimonies of Chicanas with emphasis on our innermost thoughts. Through printmaking and the incorporation of fabric, my work illustrates the precarities that Chicanas exist within this imposed country, our emotional lives, and how nature reflects our collective circumstances. Within my print and textile explorations exists an ongoing conversation regarding the borders of this land and how our patterns of migration, separation, and generational trauma can be found in our surroundings, emphasizing the colonized history of all that we interact with. By incorporating writing into my printwork – not as captions, but as integral images within a print – I choose to emphasize the distinct stories that inspire the visuals so that the work is unmistakable in meaning. In highlighting the narratives of ignored perspectives, there is a distinct choice in listening prior to drawing, inking, and creating.