True Trans Soul Rebel Interview

Hi, my name is Delzy and I’m an intern at VisArts and a student at Montgomery College, it’s great to meet you! 

What is your exhibition about?

So I named this True Trans Soul Rebel based off the song from Against Me! because Laura Jane Grace is also a transgender, musician, and my work is based on exploration, with gender practice and liberation through spirituality and me being a Mexican person I was putting some more Mexican iconography into my work. So, I do that by like the use of color the orientation of myself in space, and also the pattern work that’s being imported into the fabrics, so I use something that is part of my everyday which is my bed sheets to represent that this is something that is integral to my living and sometimes something that is like my everyday experience. So that’s why they’re on large bed sheets rather than on canvas because I think there’s a whole different conversation happening that a painting on canvas or something that is more closely personal to yourself.

Could you explain why you chose to use christian iconography in your pieces?

I grew up very Catholic, and there’s a lot of saints and iconography in the type of artwork that you see in the Bible or like in the stained glass. Everyone is wearing a halo and it’s very male oriented, and I thought that that this was a chance for me to see some representation on what it looks like for my body to be like the whole like the holiest amongst the people that I was surrounded by, or just generally see a non binary trans body.

I just felt like it was finally my turn to see myself as someone that is worthy of “God’s love”, because I look up to like the virgen de guadalupe just knowing that she means unconditional love for her children. So I thought if I can look at myself as this holier than thou person then I should just make paintings about it because there’s not enough representation in the arts. When it comes to this kind of line of work. So that’s why I surround myself as royalty or having a halo surrounding me and doing some like masculine positions, just to talk a little bit more about gender practice.

What do the hearts represent in your work?

The immaculate heart is supposed to represent the unconditional love from God to his children, so I was just like, that’s really funny, because I consider that heart as love to the self. Like an abundance of love for my non-binary body which took obviously a really long time to get there.

So, I do these paintings almost in a way like they’re just so cocky, that I present myself but it almost feels like I never had a chance to be that way. So I’m like presenting myself with these American the hearts of just like allowing myself to be in the space of loving myself and being maybe a little egotistical, but you know like, well deserved after a long period of just like questioning who I was very unsure and not trying to bound myself to something that is very unbound and honoring that.

Coming from a Catholic background, would you say that you’re healing through your exhibition?

Yeah, I consider it to be healing work because I find liberation through spirituality and I’m kind of redefining what that means to me. I don’t necessarily consider myself catholic anymore, but someone who understands doing good onto others and good will be done onto you, and just like being kind to your fellow people. So, I find spirituality through that way I find, You know I dive myself into astrology because, it’s not that it’s trendy, it’s just that it just makes a lot more sense to me of understanding like different folks. But yeah, I find myself now that I’m older and can understand these concepts a little bit like in a reframed way that I’m able to like, really enjoy spirituality for what it is rather than what someone’s idea of what they want it to be for me because I now have the autonomy to make these decisions for myself and no one’s taking that from me. And, growing up in a very Catholic household especially if you’re assigned female at birth or just assumed female that like you have a different role in your life, and I wasn’t following these roles. Clearly because I identify as many different things that are not aligned with some of the Catholic religion. So, now that I have the power just like make decisions for myself, I find that it’s a lot more liberating. And to go down this row.

There are many altars in your work, and they are often meant to signify sacrifice, prayer, and sometimes even death depending on what type of altar. Is that intentional?

Yeah, so, I decided to make more of an altar styled work. I think this idea that we have for altars very much like the idea that it’s a long table has many candles and then just like crying over like who we’re honoring, but I think in this aspect I have it’s less grieving and more of an honoring of a question that doesn’t need an answer, or honoring the unbound because I think that I’m so I was so used to growing up trying to define myself as many different things and sticking to that strict regimen, but now I can be whatever I want. And I can be many things, I can be everything, I can be nothing, I can be sustenance of one thing or absolutely nothing at all. Just honoring that the question of what is non binary doesn’t need an answer. So that’s why I stuck to altar work or creating a body in space because it’s just oblong, unbound, there’s no strict edges. So I just felt like an altar just made sense to me. I just needed something that at least something solidified in my mind that this is okay, this is moving in the way that it needs to move and it doesn’t need need guidance, it just does its own thing.

Can we talk about the white dress in your exhibition?

Yeah, so that’s part of my work called Mariposa, and I named it Mariposa because it’s something that my dad used to call me when I was younger and I thought it was just really interesting that the roles that we place on women from even in the womb and what their roles are going to be in life up until the afterlife and the the whole that the matriarch has.

So I depict I suspended different dresses from different periods of life. So there’s the Quincenera, there’s the bride and then there’s just like the full matriarch of the family like the, abuelita one that holds all the wisdom, and I just thought that was very interesting how we keep holding these like very restricted goals for women before like even asking them what they want to do with their lives anyways. I read this book called Mujerista theology and it’s about the way that these women are maneuvering through these roles and how to create community amongst themselves. So, I thought it was very interesting that I did work that was similar along the lines. And then I put dirt underneath them because the thing that I’d like to do the most is honor something for what it is. So, this was a journey for like a little bit of growth for each woman was just saying that like in this place like you’re holding many responsibilities, but you’re also growing as a human. So I think it comes off as if we’re grieving women but it’s more or less like an understanding that these women live these lives but within themselves they find community and they’re strong women, and they’re in I think that it’s easy to label them as a oppressed but I think that within themselves they find empowerment. So that’s that that pieces means a lot to me because it’s like they’re physical, their representation, they’re relics of the past so people in my family so it’s a lot of intentional work.

I noticed that there were also the different items that came out from the dirt and are underneath the dresses. What does each item in the altar mean or represent?

I feel like they’re markers of each like period in time. They’re like little secrets and the women in our family hold many secrets, many secrets about our family life, and it’s all inherently theirs and then for them to hold but I feel like these are little secrets of their own, there’s a personality within each person, it’s not just like here’s this person and that’s it, we get to like walk past this one. It’s just like, they were a main character in their own story so they have their own little characteristics like I hid toy cards under the dress and it makes me think about growing up and like actually having like friends and like, kind of hiding my own queerness and like trying to still perform as as like, as this woman in the family. And then in the wedding dress is just like the hidden secrets of sexuality within. And just trying to hide that because that’s not something that we are supposed to, like, really talk about. And then I have like a little like a little clock for the last one and it’s just the idea of just like the anxieties of growing older and how your how the afterlife my look like for you and just the anxieties and being scared of those kind of concepts and not being able to talk about them because you’re supposed to support the weight of the new children or the men in the family, so these all feel like little secrets from within these women are holding on to but aren’t aren’t given the space to do that. So it’s like trying to give them a voice for the voiceless.

Were you referencing sacraments in each stage of your altars?

It was a little less about that, although that makes a lot of sense. I did a piece of work with my baptism dress that is funny because I use these dresses from these moments of that aspect of moving up in the sacraments, but it never really was more about that was just more or less like the idea of growing up and what secrets I’m holding on to and how am I moving throughout space now. And just trying to understand where I’m going. And I think that’s reflective in all of my work just not having a clear line of what am I doing right now but rather this trying to honor the fact that I don’t know where, how things are moving in space and how I’m continuing to identify. It’s just honoring that like, not all things he didn’t answer.

I also saw a heart pendant with tiny hands, what do they symbolize to you? 

Well those are little immaculate hearts that I found. And the little hands was the very physical representation of those paintings that I always hold on to the Immaculate Heart and hold it near and dear to ourselves and like I put an Immaculate Heart for each phase of growing up and being like associated female or like women in my family just knowing that like they’re loved, no matter what. I just felt like this was like my, that was my physical love letter to them saying like I respect your role that you’ve had and the roles that you have to play. So that that was like my ode to them saying I hear you, I see you.

Would you say that your works serve as a dialogue about performative femininity in the Catholic space?

Yeah, I think life is so much a performance. And that’s really vague I know that but in life really is performing to your best ability, like you are setting the stage up for your life and then you are trying to be the certain person but then there comes a point where like it’s almost like you’re

breaking the fourth wall and you’re just like why am I doing this. And I think that growing up, when I was assumed female and I really believed it for the longest time that I was that, I was like I’m having to just, like how do I frame it? I felt like it didn’t come natural to me. It felt like I was trying way too hard to prove something that wasn’t true. And I think that that’s a role that most people play that they’re like being very performative to just to prove themselves, but I think when it comes to, like, if you’re questioning that with gender there’s probably something else going on. I think most people who are comfortable with themselves aren’t performing quite as much. I think that they don’t have to force themselves to be a certain person so I think that performative femininity suits people who are scared of the unknown. I definitely was one of those people, so I was like forcing myself into this like route but I think that more people do it more than they think, and I think that life is a very performative role but eventually do you break the fourth wall? At least I hope so. I don’t think it happens to everyone, but I think that some people like come to their own and try to figure stuff out.

Are the Sacred Hearts a message to you and your family? 

I consider them more a message to me, and non-binary folks with strict religious families. I think that there was more obstacles to come out than needed to be. I think coming out was a really arduous journey, it’s just so complicated in many different ways and some people thankfully have loving families but when you’re coming from a really strict religious family, it’s like so much more harder to come out and try to be honest with yourself. So I think the Immaculate Heart is just like I worked hard to get to where I’m at. And this is for my peeps who have gone through the same thing. To my community, because you know it’s really hard for us to live in peace without people questioning what’s in our pants. So, and like questioning our our faith to the world to whatever God you worshiped or just like anything at all it’s just like everything comes into question so this might like this feels like my heart goes out to you guys just like it goes out to the women in my family who have to deal with these concepts themselves, but really like my heart goes up to anyone who’s in the marginalized community who is having trouble just getting to be happy. Happiness is such a weird construct but everyone deserves to get there. So this more of a letter, like I mentioned earlier, not just to my family but just people who struggle with this kind of idealisation stuff.

I realized I give a lot of long winded answers. But I think that like more context is probably better for understanding this level of work because it’s very layered, it’s very complex work like it’s not just one solid idea of just like ‘I’m non-binary and I want to see myself as like an icon’. I think it’s just understanding latinx families, understanding women, understanding the queer community and being trans, and just many moving factors.

On one of your altars, Amor Eterno, there was a smudged ‘you’. Was that intentional?And if so, what did it mean?

So, that was an older piece that actually came out before I came out, but that was a piece in relationship to writing letters to love and what that looks like. I think that I struggled with the concept of love for a really long time, up until I started like being honest with myself because it felt like love didn’t come off the way that it’s supposed to be like I felt like everyone was

talking about love as if it was just so unconditional but it felt very conditional. It felt like there were so many limiting factors to what I was allowed to feel loved, or to love someone else and I felt like I was writing these letters of saying like, I don’t understand the way that people talk about you because I very much like feel like restricted in the way that you want me to be.

So, it was easy for me to make work about a past relationship that I was having because it was a very clear example of what love wasn’t wasn’t supposed to be. But the real concept of the work was just like trying to understand something that wasn’t quite clear at all. But that was under the guise of just like I wasn’t true to myself because I wasn’t treating myself in terms of

identity and sexuality, I wasn’t being honest but I also felt like I was still very stuck in my Catholic ways on what’s supposed to look like and who I was supposed to be. So I found it very restrictive at the time but now like it’s shifted. I think that a part of growing up is understanding how you love other people and how society has told us how love is supposed to be, and just kind of growing up from those ideas. Because, you know, love is whatever you define it to be. It doesn’t have to be restrictive and it doesn’t have to be harmful. It can be as unconditional as you want it to be. I feel like and now I get why people were talking about it in this way because I just wasn’t there yet, and now it’s, it’s funny cuz I’m someone who really loves love, but, you know, I like take my time with it, I take my time to try to understand the concept more. That was like a shifting piece, a piece where I since have moved. I think that was the last piece before I really was honest, like really completely honest with myself because the next piece after that was, I don’t know if you had questions about this but I had a piece where I suspended my baptism dress and there is a, there’s like a ground. But yeah that was a that was like the last piece I think I made, where I just where I was still being performative because literally right at like in the middle of me questioning love, I was questioning myself. And I was wondering why I was trying so very hard to love the wrong people and love the things that I didn’t like about myself. And I think it’s the idea that like we’re supposed to love every aspect of yourself, like I get it, I really do. I really understand that you’re like ‘love yourself!’ and I’m just like, you know what, I can have beef with myself too because there’s a lot of moving parts of being a human being so you don’t have to absolutely die for yourself but you can always still leave room for yourself to grow and foster community amongst yourself. 5 And then I made this piece where I was completely just so vulnerable with my cohort. Literally, it was like two days before I had flown out to see my cohort that I made the move to be like, ‘I am non binary, I’m changing my name, I’m changing my pronouns’, because I just, I had it up to here with myself, where I was just like ‘I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be red, I’m blue. I can’t do this’. So, in that period of making this work that was my first grieving piece, but it wasn’t sad because I was grieving a person that was still with me and that was what the piece was about. It’s that I was grieving this past identity of mine because at that time, that person identified as she and she had taught me a lot of things about what it means to like be part of a community that didn’t want you to begin with and then went through a lot of hardships. But then, like it was taking those lessons as she that I was able to become they. That I was able to move forward and then I hosted like a funeral for myself as part of my art piece where I got everyone together and I said final words to myself.

And it was really awkward because it’s like you’re grieving someone that is still me but also not me at all. Like I’m grieving the performance. I’m grieving the time that is lost and like giving a performance. So I think that’s where I started to really understand more love, because like I went from one piece of my understanding it and like almost being against it, to now just like saying I don’t have to carry this weight anymore and now I can love the way that I feel that feels right to me. So, yeah, that piece launched my whole series, because I made that piece and then I made the dresses which felt like an attachment to that piece. And then I was just like, I’m still wanting to create a body in space and but also don’t know what I’m doing half of the time. So I started making the altarpieces because I’m just like, if I don’t know what I’m doing that I’m just gonna be honest about that and I’m going to honor it for what it is. So, yeah, I needed that moment of clarity and like stopping the performance, and to just finally be where I’m at right now.

Yeah, there were a lot of words in one of your pieces and then I see ‘AZUL’ in big bold letters. Is that what you meant? 

Yeah, I was writing more letters to myself. I felt like, you know, part of my words that I didn’t include or photograph was just like, I write to myself so much, I have journals upon journals upon journals of trying to understand love, trying to maneuver through my relationships, trying to maneuver through my body and just like really questioning myself and like I constantly writing letters to myself to reaffirm that these are valid feelings. So that’s why I was writing on the pedestals for the work because I was writing letters to these moments in time of where these dresses were made, like from childhood to adulthood to the future of me to just come to terms with the fact that I was this and now I’m not this. So, it was just trying to validate these weird feelings that I was having. But yeah like sometimes it’s just like the physical exertion of just writing is just so helpful and so useful. And I think I wanted to include more words and like this kind of work but I think it just speaks for itself at this point. Especially with the altar being so physically there and sometimes less is more. I think in these cases I needed to write to expel out the energy but I think in this body of work that I’m doing now, words are just there, the work is poetry as it is, and like, I don’t need to beat a dead horse.

Yeah, you mentioned stages. What would you say is the order for the altar pieces right now?

Yeah, so it’s like one whole piece and it’s not very linear anymore, it’s more of like,

I’m just gonna just move wherever I want because I’m still creating this body but this body doesn’t have any firm edges or like doesn’t start and end anywhere. I think that this one is just more or less like it’s a rhizome. It’s existing as it is, it’s like, it’s just weird. I’m sorry I’ve lack of better terms right now but it’s kind of hard to describe because it’s just, it’s work that is supposed to be unbound. So I don’t think this isn’t necessarily there’s phases of it but I think that this is a work that will continue to manifest in very different ways. I think at this moment right now it’s looking like altars. And then, in the future, it might look like, you know, printmaking work and what that might look like. It might look like film work because I value the process of me working through these concepts so I think that’s just the concept is ever moving. I just think the physical manifestations just might look a little different each time, because it’s just weird. I can’t bound the unbound and I think I keep trying to but then I have to stop and be like, no, that’s cool.

Can we talk about your paintings too? I loved your paintings by the way. I’ve noticed that they have very bold brushstrokes and colors, where does your fascination come from?

Yeah, so I actually have synesthesia, so I only see life in color and feel emotions in color and understand it in music as well, so it is physically impossible for me to do a less than saturated painting. It’s a language. So I feel these emotions as I’m painting them as these deep, deep like saturated colors. There’s no emotion to me that isn’t passionate. I mean like you could argue that sometimes you’re not feeling as intense all the time, but the way that I experienced it feels like an intensity. So that’s why I paint in like these like super vibrant colors, but I think I’m also just really in touch with my Mexican roots and understanding that the painting styles that come from Mexican types of work ends up being super saturated, but that didn’t really catch on to me until much where I was studying art history and I was looking at works like Frida Kahlo or understanding Day of the Dead altars or sculpture artists like Pepon Osorio who’s a Puerto

Rican artists who does amazing alter works too but like it’s saturated work and it invokes feeling, so that’s me being a highly emotional person. That’s why I pay with so many colors, but I think it also helps that I have like a physical condition where like I literally just can’t

understand it any other way and also thank you for the compliment that was very nice.

I did see that in your paintings, there are characteristics of Mexican culture in your subjects. For example, there is a painting of a store that is painted in mostly reds, greens and whites. 

Yeah, so, there are very inherently things that are Mexican. So like they’re markers of every single person’s culture that just feel very nostalgic to me. Like going to the grocery store every like Saturday morning with my mom to this store called El Guanajuato. So it’s very Mexican and they have the painted like signs and it’s like, I don’t know if you have experienced this but like you know every Mexico grocery store has like neon signs that they’ve campaign themselves, or they’re like painted chicken where all the little prices of the pounds worth and all that stuff. I just felt like it was just so part of my everyday that I was like ‘I need to paint, this is like an experience’. So that’s why I painted El Guanajuato and I just thought it was really funny because it just felt like home. It just was invoking this feeling that this was inherently me and this was my culture and this is an experience, this is my family, like this was something that I know many other latinx people will experience. But I do that with all of my work with the iconography and the stuff that you see in my work. I think there’s just this piece, it’s called lovely, and I don’t know if you saw because I haven’t updated my website, but it’s the sun and the moon with like the evil eye and like monstera leaves in the back but like this is a piece that is so seen and, like Mexican solid paintings like this sun and the moon where they’re colliding together, and I just feel like it’s only stuff that makes sense to me and I’m nostalgic for because it’s just like something that I grew up with. So I think that’s why I like lean to see that because it’s part of my everyday and something that I’m trying to grasp is my every day with my work, like with the use of the bed sheets, of like using myself as a subject because I see myself and I see myself as someone who’s so in touch with their culture but someone who also wants to be in touch with their spirituality. So I don’t know if that necessarily answers your question, but I feel like it’s just like, it only makes sense to me to paint the things that I know that are like in my life constantly.

And like, maybe the sun and the moon doesn’t show up quite physically but it shows up like spiritually to me. So, and it also maybe just helps I have an active imagination.

I try to pay tribute to my culture as much as I can, without necessarily always making it about my culture and more or less about who I am as a person. But I want to say that I received the critique my first year and like a higher ed that someone, who identified as being part of my culture as well, was very disappointed in me for only painting Mexican paintings. And I wanted to elaborate a little bit on that because I think that like that I understand that there’s the idea that some people just want to see the artists, rather than like the Mexican artist, but I think that destroys any sort sort of chance that people like us, who are very into their culture, don’t get to have a place because we have to perform to the white standard of what art is supposed to look like. So that’s why I’m very intentional with making sure that that like these pieces are very inherently latinx because I am very inherently it next and I am a latinx person and I’m just like, there’s no way you’re going to be able to subtract that from me because it’s who I am.

So like this iconography, the colors, the feelings, the content work they’re very intentional work for me to not erase who I am. That’s because it’s part of my identity and like you’re not going to take that away from me. Also like this is representation for other folks who are just want to see themselves in the media or anywhere they are at, like, leave me alone.

But yeah, I think that we just need to reframe the way that we think about that stuff. That if you don’t want to associate yourself as just being only the Mexican artist then that’s cool too, but there’s other folks out there who just- it’s so part of their identity, so part of their work that we shouldn’t chastise people for wanting to feel this way. For example, in feminism we don’t chastise stay-at-home moms because they like being stay-at-home moms, like they’re not oppressed, they just like what they do. So that’s just an example.

Do you think your synesthesia has an influence on who you’ve become and your artwork?

I think many people didn’t understand me when I would say ‘growing up felt like crimson reds and like maples yellows, all the time’. I think that like from the beginning, people were just like, ‘what are you doing?’, and I’m just like, ‘Dude, I’m like living life’. I view things so differently so I think in a way it did influence who I am now because I am able to experience so many emotions  and languages so differently from the others. And I think it only helps my artwork because I was able to see my artwork in many different perspectives. Like I can see it head on, but I like being able to feel it in many different ways was just so helpful for me to frame things like literally

physically frame it on the canvas and move around with the kind of things I do but I think after a while I was able to like dictate with my notes and it was just like what exactly I’m trying to say what am I exactly trying to feel, what am I doing with my work? So in a way, kind of yeah, it kind of did influence me.

Did you ever take inspiration from like an artist, or was this something experimental?

You know honestly I just can’t control my hand. It does what it wants. I tried to be less restrictive about my painting style and let my hand do what it does naturally because I knew that once I was directing myself in the way that I was making work that I was restricting myself with the content that I was making with work because I think that like it was just easy to go down that route. If you stop doing one thing, that’s going to lead to another thing, it’s going to snowball-effect. So now when it comes to my work I’m less interested in something that is realistic and more interested in something that I’m feeling. And like, you can see it a lot with my blending work that I’m invoking that feeling rather than trying to make something look pretty for the sake of looking pretty. Because like I’m usually blending these colors together that I’m just like this is the language that I want. I also think that I get a lot of influence from Frida Kahlo in the way that she does her work. Yeah, and Frida Kahlo, she’s a force, but like her work in terms of evoking emotion meant a lot to me. So I feel like I get influenced a lot by her work because she was just another emotional person. Like a lot of stuff is going on in her life and she’s often depicted images of love, even if they weren’t the happiest of things. So I think that I get influenced by trying to invoke those same kinds of feelings.

Now that you mention Frida Kahlo, I see a resemblance with one of her portraits, The Two Fridas, and you know the hearts that connected in the string. 

Yeah, that actually influenced my last altarpiece with the letters with the other person in it because you can see me when I had my longer blue hair and then you can see my ex partner with our hearts being entangled and she does influence my work a lot but I try to define love in like those different ways because I think that the difference of me and Frida is the way that we like consider what we view as love. And I think that’s only based off of like the time period where she was at. I honestly think that if she was alive now she’d be non-binary herself. Or like gender queer I think, I don’t know, she was experimenting with that kind of stuff. As you saw her picture of her dressing up more masculine. But yeah, she does influence my work a lot, I just think that she does it without me ever noticing at first until much later that I’m just like, oh yeah.

That looks similar to this, but that one was more directly influenced because I like that concept of like the entangled hearts.

My first thoughts on the white dresses were that they seemed like ghosts above the altar sites.

Yeah, I like that there’s like room for interpretation for this kind of work because you see it as ghosts and they could, you know, formally be shells of what you know these women but I think the way that we perceive death can be reframed in a way that it’s just like they don’t, like the card of death in Taro doesn’t necessarily always mean an end, it also means new beginnings.

So that’s the way that I’m viewing like death in a way that these are new opportunities for these women to like have a voice, because there is a very physical aspect of just like they

can speak up for themselves and  like of course they can, but I think that this having artwork that speaks for them as well as another way of showing representation and that’s something that I’m like trying to like emphasize with our conversation is that there needs to be more representation for these marginalized folks for them to see themselves in the work, you know, but that’s very interesting that you interpreted that from the work. I always really like other people’s interpretations because I’m just like, yeah, that’s really good.

I also wanted to talk about the painting, Disintegration, and how the subject just kind of dissolves into abstraction.

Oh yeah, Disintegration. That is about my mom, and we’re actually at the grocery store, that same grocery store that I painted, where she was picking fruit but that was more of a conversation about mental health and women, and like very strictly latinx culture of where

they’re not necessarily allowed to give them the space to like talk about that. So I had her like physically disintegrated because she was at this point in her life where like, she couldn’t talk about these things that were affecting her without her also just being like, ‘Oh, I’m being crazy’ and I’m just like, ‘No, let’s talk about mental health in latino communities’. It’s like let’s talk about how there’s no resources for us to really go to, especially with like creating these spaces with

our parents because they’ve been told the same thing. So, yeah, I feel like I’m depicting so many people’s stories that are within my family but I’m also trying to be like, but wait there’s more. There’s other things that are going on behind the scene, and that’s why another concept that I’m playing with is the fact of airing dirty laundry. And it makes sense with the bedsheets because the way that I’m suspending them usually typically I have more of these bedsheets that like form a body. There’s about like seven sheets of this because it’s a seven being the holiest number, and they’re suspended with like little clothing lines and like little Eclipse.

And I like play with the idea that I’m airing dirty laundry, but it’s really just like trying to create a conversation about these traditions that we hold so deeply in our culture that aren’t very supportive. They’re just really oppressive. So, I’m just trying to like, create these conversations. But in this in this case this work is more of the altar work of understanding that like the body is something weird and a blob and it doesn’t have to be defined like we’re not perfect circles or

squares, we’re like little voluptuous people. But yeah, the work has six different meanings and also none at all. But, you know, I gotta respect it for what it is because if I keep trying to find it then I’m going to drive myself mad.

Thank you for talking to me this. This is great. I’ve learned a lot then, you know, then just looking at your pieces like I feel like I’m even gonna go read that book.

You should! It’s very complex but it’s good.

I have more work on Instagram that kind of falls along with what I was saying if you want to check it out just to have a deep understanding because it’s just I do a lot of pain works that like deal with this concept so if you ever wanted to check it out I can give you my handle. (@azulnog)

Before we go, do you want to talk about future works related to your exhibition?

Yeah, so right now I’m only displaying the altar work for this exhibition but future work looks like suspending these sheets in nature, because I feel like, you know there’s a whole different context with displaying stuff in galleries versus displaying them like out into the world and I felt like this is not something that I want it to be politicized, I guess you could say, like there’s a lot of politics when it comes to like white walls, white artists like galleries. So I felt like these pieces belong somewhere where they’re going to grow as I grow so I wanted to suspend them in nature, and just kind of like see those pieces as they are there. And that’s where the work has seemed to be moving forward towards to. But, you know, constantly like, they’re taking on different routes, they look like paintings or career making, and they look like film work, so who knows what my work is going to look like in a year. It’s ever evolving.

But yeah, that’s, that’s what I’ll say how my future work looks like.

Okay, I’m excited! It was nice meeting you, you know. Have a good day!

It was really nice meeting you too!

This interview was conducted by Delzy, the Exhibitions Intern 2021.

Official website:delzyalarcon.weebly.com Instagram @_delarama