Yo trabajo con la tierra / I work with the earth
Curated by Paloma Mayorga
August 20 — September 24, 2022
Alejandra Regalado, Sui #5, Series: SURFACE, Holbox, Quintana Roo, Mexico, digital photography, 2016
Yo trabajo con la tierra / I work with the earth features five women artists that explore movement and place in relation to landscape, geological bodies, and other nonhuman intelligences. Using their own body as medium, the artists share ecofeminist sensibilities through video, installation, sculpture, photography, and performance works.
The title of this exhibition recalls an interview by Ana Mendieta, where she begins describing her Silueta Series with the phrase, “I work with the earth, with nature, and I make sculptures in the landscape, in the environment outside.” Her sentiment evokes a collaborative relationship with nature and offers a lens shared by the exhibiting artists.
This exhibition aims to reveal marginalized perspectives in the environmental movements prompting a sense of kinship to the earth, and consequently, a more compassionate understanding of ourselves and each other.
Exhibiting artists
Yo trabajo con la tierra / I work with the earth runs from August 20 through September 24, 2022. Gallery hours on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays 12-6pm.
Programming
Member Preview
August 19, 7-9pm
Exclusive for Big Medium Members
Artist Panel Discussion
August 20, 11am-12pm
Open to the public
Yo trabajo con la tierra / I work with the earth
Curaduría por Paloma Mayorga
del 20 de agosoto al 24 de septiembre
Yo trabajo con la tierra / I work with the earth presenta el trabajo de cinco mujeres artistas, quienes exploran movimiento y lugar en relación al paisaje, cuerpos geológicos y otras inteligencias no humanas. Utilizando el cuerpo como medio, las artistas comparten sensibilidades ecofeministas a través de video, instalaciones, escultura, fotografía y performance.
El título de esta exposición hace referencia a una entrevista de Ana Mendieta, quien al describir su trabajo en la serie Silueta, expresa —Yo trabajo con la tierra, con la naturaleza y hago esculturas en el paisaje, en el ambiente afuera.— Su sentimentalismo evoca una relación colaborativa con la naturaleza y ofrece una visión compartida por las artistas expositoras.
Esta exhibición intenta revelar perspectivas marginadas en los movimientos ambientales, los cuales incitan afinidad con la tierra y consecuentemente un entendimiento más compasivo de nosotros mismos.
Artistas expositoras
VLM (Virginia Luna Montgomery)
Yo trabajo con la tierra / I work with the earth estará en exhibición del 20 de agosto al 24 de septiembre del 2022. Abierta al público durante horas de operación los jueves, viernes y sábados de 12-6pm.
Eventos
Inauguración
el 19 de agosto de 7-9pm
Exclusiva para Miembros de Big Medium
Conversación entre las artistas
el 20 de agosto de 11am-12pm
Abierta al público
About the Artists
Melissa Aguirre
Monterrey, Mexico
Melissa Aguirre is a visual artist, writer, and art therapist based in Monterrey, Mexico. Her work involves artistic-scientific investigations that focus on human and geological bodies and the concept of time.
Aguirre holds a degree in Visual Arts and a Master’s in Social Work from the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, in addition to various other degrees from the Universidad Iberoamericana de México, the Universidad Metropolitana de México, The University of Tennessee and The University of Arlington, Texas.
Her artistic work has been presented in the museum Ex-Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City, Tina B – The Prague Contemporary Art Festival, Venice International Performance Art Week, and other international spaces in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia, Spain, France, Czech Republic, Italy, and Cyprus. Aguirre is the author of Habla todo lo que quieras. Ensayo autobiográfico sobre el miedo como dispositivo de la violencia published in 2018 by tresnubesediciones.
She has also received various awards, including First Place for Performance Art Award 2009 (UNAM), FINANCIARTE 2009 (CONARTE), 2013 and 2016 PECDA (CONARTE), 2014 State Arts Award for Youth (State Secretariat for Youth), PADID 2016, 2017 and 2018 (CENART-CONACULTA), a special grant from FONCA in 2018 (CONACULTA), FORCAN 2018 (Ministry of Culture of Chihuahua, Mexico), and the 2019 grant for writing by El Centro de Escritores in Nuevo Leon, Mexico.
Alexa Capareda
Austin, Texas
Alexa Capareda is a sugar-powered dancing noodle robot who engages in unaffected virtuosity, versatility, and the earnest and playful. She works at the intersection of structure and creativity and enjoys experimenting with short-form parameters in video work.
Capareda began studying ballet in her native Philippines, eventually trained in Austin and Montreal, and danced professionally with Balet Bratislava in Slovakia. She has worked in Austin since 2013 with Performa/Dance, Frank Wo/Men Collective, ARCOS, Magdalena Jarkowiec, Jennifer Sherburn, BLiPSWiTCH, Transitory Sound and Movement Collective, Austin Camerata, and LOLA Austin. She has collaborated with sound artists Steve Parker, Brent Baldwin, and Henna Chou, and visual artists Tom Suhler and Susan Scafati.
Capareda is Rehearsal Director for Ballet Austin II and the Butler Fellows and has restaged and choreographed multiple works for BAII and the fellowship program. She has presented work at Austin Dance Festival, Barnstorm Dance Festival, and Fusebox Festival.
She was a prizewinner at the 2013 Festival of Choreographic Miniatures in Serbia and recipient of the 2017 Austin Critics Table Award for Excellence as Dancer. She has a BA English, minor in Theater and Dance from UT-Austin.
Paloma Mayorga
Austin, Texas
Paloma Mayorga is a Mexican American interdisciplinary artist and independent curator based in Austin, Texas. Through unconventional forms of photography, installation, mixed media, and video works, Mayorga creates elaborate self-portraits that document the subtleties found in the interaction between her body and nature.
Her work has been exhibited across Texas, including The Contemporary Austin, Artpace, Mexic-Arte Museum, Southwestern University, and Texas State University. She earned a B.A. in Painting from the Sarofim School of Fine Arts at Southwestern University in 2010, and has gone on to receive the Emerging Artist Award from the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center in 2015, Best Visual Artist by the Austin Chronicle 2017 Reader’s Poll, and Southwestern University’s 18 Under 40 Award for 2020. Mayorga currently works as the Director of Development for Big Medium.
VLM (Virginia LUNA Montgomery)
Austin, Texas
VLM is a multimedia artist whose projects reveal everyday magic in the world around us. She received her BFA from The University of Texas at Austin in 2008 and her MFA from Yale University in Sculpture in 2016. Working across video, performance, sound, and sculpture, her artwork explores atomic consciousness from a metaphysical feminist POV. Her artwork is surreal, sensorial, and symbolic. It blends together mysticism, science, and autobiography. It also shifts in subject matter from ponytails to particle accelerators, to syrups, stones, moths and machines as VLM deploys an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary of repeating gestures like drilling, dousing, or reaching and recursive symbols like circles, holes, and spheres. VLM’s diverse artistic movements interrogate the complex relationship between physical and psychic structures via gestures of agency and empathy.
VLM has had solo shows with New Museum (NY), Times Square Arts (NY), Museum Folkwang (Germany), Wright Lab at Yale University (CT), The Lawndale Art Center (TX), False Flag (NY), and Hesse Flatow (NY). She has also exhibited in group exhibitions at institutions including SculptureCenter (NY), La Panacée-MoCo (France), The Hessel Museum at Bard College (NY), The Banff Centre (Canada), Socrates Sculpture Park (NY), The Menil Collection (TX), and Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Denmark), among others.
Alejandra Regalado
Austin, Texas
Born in Mexico City, Alejandra Regalado is an Austin-based multidisciplinary artist working in photography, sculpture, video, performance, and installation. Regalado creates intimate connections that explore the subconscious mind. Driven by a sense of physical and conceptual borders, her work evokes hearts craving for an intellectual self-immersing view into depths the soul of reality. In her latest series, SURFACE, Regalado documents performances where she immerses herself in rivers, open ocean, and natural caverns across Mexico to create intimate self-portraits.
Regalado received her BA in History of Art from Universidad Iberoamericana and MS in Science Communication from Tec de Monterrey, Mexico; and MPS Digital Photography from School of Visual Arts, New York. Her work has been shown in galleries and festivals across the US and Mexico. She has been awarded the Individual Artist Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, and First Place in Professional Photography at Festival Internacional de la Imagen, Mexico. Regalado has also participated as an artist in residence of the Galería de la Raza, San Francisco and the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago.
