The Elephant Trust Application
OFRENDA | EL FESTIVAL DE DIA DE MUERTOS
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Photography
2020
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Dirt Installation
2021
Hola Stephanie
Gracias por tomarse el tiempo de revisar mi trabajo y por esta gran oportunidad.
I have organized potential works that may interest you for this festival. Click on the image to view a larger version.
I have also added dimensions and conceptual information. (Feel free to skim through it as I can also expand on this in person)
Thank you again for your time and consideration. It is greatly appreciated.
Digital Portfolio:
At this moment, death is in the foreground of humanity. Usually within the western contemporary world we avoid it, run from it, keep it at bay, yet death remains hidden lurking in the depths of our psyches. Death held a gravitas and place historically during the seventeenth century in the western world although this has long been forgotten. However, the recent Covid-19 pandemic has proven itself to be a fierce and ruthless confrontation with life's greatest mystery. Regardless of our cultural understanding of life, morality, religion, politics, and so on, we all have death in common. It connects us to every sentient being. Furthermore, according to the cosmologist Katie Mack even our universe will die. Death unifies all that exist in the cosmos. Contrary to the contemporary western convention death has been—and continues to be—celebrated in Mexican culture for millenniums.
So how is it that so much of contemporary western society is built on denying and actively turning away from this fundamental certainty? Because of fear? Yes, of course, there’s fear of the unknown, and understandably so. However, the question we have to ask ourselves is: Do we want to live in a society that’s limited by, defined by, and built on fear? Or do we strive for one that’s built on passion, vitality, drive, and a deeper reverence for life and its essential counterpart, death? One that recognizes both life and death with respect and appreciation? The notion of death can even serve as a solace in an uncertain world in constant flux.
This Memento Mori—meaning remember you must die—is a contemporary interpretation in which I depicted myself minutes before my own death (aging myself significantly with the use of photoshop). Death doesn’t just consist of the destruction of the physical body, but also the deconstruction of the mythological and psychological selves. These are deaths and rebirths that occur within an individual’s psyche. As the Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson puts it, “Often, when new growth occurs, the most dreadful things seem to happen, but then we see that they were exactly what was required [...] It is easy to be optimistic after the fact but it is devilishly painful while it is happening. There is a sort of inner chaotic evolutionary warfare” (Robert A. Johnson).This warfare is rooted in that old part of our brain, which is desperately trying to survive.
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Memento Mori
Photography & Digital Painting
2020
50''x50''
One must symbolically let this part of ourselves die so that we can live in new ways. Our brain's most important task is survival; therefore, the acceptance of death can feel counterintuitive, even though it is a reality that we will all face. Despite not being something that the rational mind truly wants to accept, stepping into the unknown is what both the Covid-19 pandemic and the climate crisis demands from us. All transformation comes from outside our comfort zones. This new form of existence may even revitalise our emotions.
Somatic Shift
Performance & Film
2021
TURN SOUND ON
Film by Alondra Ruiz Hernandez
Music by Owen Ho
Somatic Shift is an installation, performance and film in which I heavily incorporate the body. The sound in this film is a collaboration with Local London Composer Owen Ho. The dirt patterns on the floor form a symbolic grave. The intuitive drawings counterpoise order and chaos in its juxtaposing geometric and organic forms. The film ends with my own burial. Death can either engender a paralyzing fear or it can serve as a mechanism to catalyze positive and meaningful transformation on both individual and collective levels. During this year I have lost friends and family. This was a direct response to the death of a family member. These experiences with losing loved ones engendered a fierce bodily pain. Much of modern society “place[s] higher value on thoughts than on feelings […] The result is a cortico-centric orientation in which there is a top-down bias emphasizing mental processes and minimizing the bottom-up feeling emanating from our body” (Stephen W. Porges). To only value the top down rational process leads to a sort of dead sensation within a living individual’s body. I believe it is essential to deconstruct the colonial thoughts, preferences and values that form a sort of allegiance to the rational mind. I do not intend to dismiss the rational nor the incredible discoveries which the rational mind allows for and nurtures. However, this allegiance materializes a divided mind where the rational is held in far greater importance over the emotional. If we neglect emotional wellbeing, it leads not only to difficult unnecessary suffering for individuals but for those individuals to further traumatize future generations.
Any path we choose in life will inevitably lead to some form of heartbreak. However, heartbreak is a symbol of genuine care. David Whyte explains “So many visions of the future are adultescent hopes of escape from the present, especially from the heartbreak of the present. Really you only have a future when you come into the heartbreak and ground of this life” (Whyte). Furthermore, the psychotherapist, writer, and soul activist Francis Weller argued, “if you care at all about the world your heart is breaking and it should be [....] it’s the broken heart that can fall back in love with the world” (Francis Weller).
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Incorporeal Shift
Photography & Digital Painting
2020
48''x48''
During the creation of Incorporeal Shift I employed an auto-ethnographic methodology in which I revisit my sketchbook reactions of my experiences with Mexican artwork and artisanry. The aesthetic and cultural vibrancy of my Mexican ancestors captivated me and vigorously poured into my oil painting. Visually fused forms and colours intertwine. Nothing is an absolute solid form, rather an echo of a material that once existed and now it transformed to the next element. This painting encapsulated the distortion of time I experienced during the lockdown as nothing felt certain or solid—similarly to forms within the painting. Incorporeal refers to the non-material, the non-physical; The liminal space between life and death. It isn’t either death or life but simultaneously it is both. “We live in a world where the space surrounding our bodies is at all times permeated with the information of countless radio stations and websites, where we carry devices in our pockets capable of connecting us instantly with people on the other side of the world. Today, deep interconnectivity is recognized as a basic truth to our world both in terms of our technology, and also in the deep structure of reality as revealed by our most advanced physics. Quantum physics tells us that our world emerges out of deeply interconnected fabric, and that under certain conditions, the underlying nonlocal order permits different points in space and time to be mysteriously interconnected.” (Adrian David Nelson)
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Body as The Frame
Dual Identity Series
Photography
2019
