A Very Anxious Feeling: Voices of Unrest in the American Experience - Catalog - Page 26
Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, Huelemos Como Tu [We Smell Like You], 2018
rubber, sulfur, tree residue, paint residue, pine gum, latex paint on found clothes
experiences of women who have survived trauma, or who
have sacrificed their lives to cross into the U.S., have been
deprived of their own bodies just as others have been
deprived of land, property, or possessions. Huelemos Como
Tu [We Smell Like You], Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio’s sculpture,
encapsulates the physical and psychic marks experienced
and inherited through generations of injustice against
humans and the planet. Using found clothing—symbols of
the remnants of migration—Aparicio soaks the fabrics in
rubber and pine sap and molds them around marked and
scarred tree trunks in Los Angeles, home to the largest
Salvadoran diaspora. Both the trees and the clothing carry
the marks and memories of lived experience, the visible
scars on the trees imprinted into the soft textiles of human
clothing. william cordova transforms his experiences of
displacement and adaptation into treasure. In Memories of
Underdevelopment, a Peruvian reed boat, stereo, and
graffiti-tagged car are suspended within a field of gold leaf,
alluding to the process of turning experiences into cultural
gold. The children depicted in both Elmer Guevara’s and
Sandy Rodriguez’s portraits offer different stories of the
promise of arriving stateside. Guevara’s self-portrait visually
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describes the adult-like role the artist took on as his parents’
translator, which involved making important family
decisions, while Rodriguez’s delicately rendered portrait of
Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin, the seven-year-old child
who died in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border
Protection in 2019, contains the agony of this loss. “If there
is a function for art, it is to prompt conversation and action,”
Rodriguez said. “If you can do it while seducing people with
material and beauty, then I think you have a better chance
of motivating people.”
The exploration of untold histories is paramount in the
works of Firelei Báez, Clotilde Jiménez, and William
Villalongo. Both Villalongo and Jiménez take on art history
with all of its omissions and embodied injustices. Villalongo’s
Nymph #6 combines two tropes from art history that are
often considered unrelated—18th century nymph paintings
and modernist abstraction. One reflects the desire for
images of the nude female body, while the other reflects the
Eurocentric and colonial mentality of consuming and
appropriating non-western cultures for their own use, as
seen in the works of artists like Picasso. Similarly,
