Picture credit: Evelyn Martínez
I create work in the spirit of Professor Brené Brown’s iconic Ted Talk titled The Power of Vulnerability, where Brown declares that “courage can be defined as a person’s ability to tell their story with their whole heart.” My poetic and visual art practice serves as a space to share my lived experiences courageously. Currently, my work centers stories of body shame, fat phobia and self-reconciliation. As a 40th Street Artist-in-Residence, I created a series of poems and long exposure self-portraits titled Mirror Talk. Long exposure photography demands that the subject remain absolutely still in order to achieve a crisp image. In this process, I challenged myself to confront my reflection by looking directly at the camera lens, in either complete stillness or while incorporating sudden movements to capture the discomfort I experienced while wearing corsets and body shapers as a teenager.
As a West Bay View Foundation Fellow at Dieu Donné, I expanded on Mirror Talk through a series of vivid pulp paintings. Some of these compositions depict abstracted landscapes created with tape measures, embedded thread and flesh tone pulp paints, and some are large-scale pulp paintings of semi-nude pictures that I embedded within an accumulation of colorful, organic pulp painted textures. Inspired by NEA National Heritage Fellow Ofelia Esparza, I used three pulp paintings to create Altar a mis estrías terrestres/Altar to corporal striations, an altar installation honoring my body and the trauma it has endured. I grounded the installation in traditional altar practices by adorning the paintings with a handmade paper flower arch and white candles. These days, my artwork is inspired by the fat liberation movement and grounded in the works of fat liberationists such as, renowned author Roxane Gay, research therapist Dr. Ericka Hart, photographers Laura Aguilar and Shoog McDaniel, and poet Yesika Salgado.