MARCA X: Decolonizing the Body: Artist Talk

Date: 

Thursday, February 8, 2018, 6:30pm

Location: 

La Galería, 85 W Newton Street, Boston, MA 02118

marca_x

SpeakersAllison Maria Rodriguez, artist and curator and Joaquin Terrones, Lecturer in Literature and Women's and Gender Studies at MIT and curator of the current DRCLAS Exhibition Guiñadas Gráciles. 

Mediator: Julia Csekö, artist

Participating speakers and performing artists from Marca X:

  • Anais Azul

  • Auddie Rodriguez

  • Izzy Berdan

  • Eddie Maisonet

  • Ming Li

  • Rixy Fz

  • Nate Devarie


Allison Maria Rodriguez is a Boston-based interdisciplinary artist working predominately in new media, film/video and installation. Her work explores the limits of representation and the space in between meaning. She is consistently searching for methods and approaches that destabilize conventional ways of knowing and understanding the world. With themes ranging from human migration to species extinction, her work converges on a desire to understand the space within which language fails and lived experience remains unarticulated. Rodriguez received her MFA from Tufts University/The School of the Museum of Fine Arts and holds a BA in Language, Literature and Culture from Antioch College in OH, obtained also through study at Oxford University in England and Kyoto Seika University in Japan. She has taught courses in art theory and media production in a variety of contexts, from universities to children’s museums. She is also an independent curator of local group exhibitions and screenings and participates in artist collectives such as the Boston LGBTQIA Artists Alliance (BLAA) and the former Axiom Group.Rodriguez has been an Artist-in-Residence at The Studios at MASS MoCA at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Arts Letters & Numbers and The Wassaic Project. She became a core member of Fountain Street Fine Art Gallery in Boston in Sept 2017. Upcoming in 2018, she will be the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Dorchester Art Project and a resident at The Ragdale Foundation and the Churchill Northern Studies Centre.

Joaquin Terrones is a faculty member in the Harvard College Writing Program, where he also serves as an editor for Exposé magazine and a Faculty Associate for the Harvard Writing Project. His current research interests include the representation of disease and violence in contemporary Latin American urban culture; same-sex desire in Latin American visual art and sculpture since the post-war period; continuities between the New World Baroque and 20th-century poetry; and the interplay between realism and intertextuality in contemporary Brazilian and Mexican cinema. He received his S.B. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. His doctoral dissertation focused on the rediscovery of the Baroque as a viable aesthetic during the thirties in Latin and North America. He recently completed a translation of Mexican artist Abraham Cruz Villegas's prose, to be included in a catalogue of his work by Harvard University Press. He is also working on a collection of short stories. He curated the current exhibit at DRCLAS, 
Guiñadas Gráciles: Looking Out for the Queer in Latin American Video Art.

Julia Csekö was born in Colorado and grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In 2011, Csekö moved to Boston, Massachusetts to pursue a MFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University. Graduating in 2013, she mounted her thesis exhibition at Laconia Gallery in Boston. Csekö is the recipient of a 2016 Walter Feldman Fellowship, awarded by the Arts and Business Council of Greater Boston resulting in her 1st solo exhibition in the USA. Csekö divides her time between being a practicing artist and an independent curator, presently serving as the Arts Program Coordinator at Villa Victoria Center for the Arts (IBA Boston). In her role at VVCA she is implementing an exhibitions program at La Galleria, showcasing contemporary art by artist of Latin American origin/heritage, including artists working within Latin American subjects and aesthetics. Csekö has been selected for the MASS MoCA residency program to take place in May 2018 where she will further explore her multi-disciplinary practice as a sculptor, painter and performer. Her most recent work gravitates around video performances exploring her experience as a Brazilian immigrant in North America and the existencial shenanigans that ensue. Her trajectory as a curator and organizer focuses on diversity, inclusion, community building, innovation, political engagement, experimentation and risk-taking. Csekö has participated and organized numerous group exhibitions at national and international venues as well as in unconventional spaces such as houses under construction and a Ferry Boat. Her work is featured in collections including the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada; the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro and Centro Cultural São Paulo, Brazil, as well as private collections in the United States and Brazil.

This Artist Talk and Panel Discussion is related to the Boston LGBTQIA Artist Alliance's fourteenth exhibition, titled Marca X. For this exhibit, BLAA partnered with Inquilinos Boricuas en Accion (IBA) and La Galería at Villa Victoria Center for the Arts, the Harvard Ed Portal's Crossings Gallery (HEP), and DRCLAS.

This exhibition will offer a platform of self-expression for LGBTQIA Latinx artists. Often marginalized by the dominant culture even within their own communities, this show celebrates the intersectional identities of these artists, offering a space for empowerment, community, representation and visibility. This exhibition will contain several unique, distinctive voices (both conceptually and aesthetically) that also function as part of a larger collective conversation about contemporary intersectionality.

 

The exhibition is on view in two spaces: from January 19, 2018 - February 16, 2018 at La Galería at Villa Victoria Center for the Arts, and from January 11, 2018 - February 15, 2018 at the Harvard Ed Portal's Crossing Gallery.

 

Image credit: "Amurqua" by Izzy Berdan.