I’m an Afro-Dominican American artist, author, and neighborhood organizer from the South Bronx, NY at present primarily based in London, UK. In 2017, I graduated from the USC Roski College of Artwork & Design in Los Angeles with a Bachelor’s Diploma in Wonderful Arts. In 2024, I graduated with an MFA in Portray from the UCL Slade College of Wonderful Arts in London. I’ve proven my work internationally, participated in quite a few artist residencies, and have obtained grants and awards for my apply (most lately the Adrian Carruthers Studio Prize for my Slade MFA Diploma Present presentation.) I’m at present an artist-in-residence at ACME’s early careers program in London. In my social apply, I function a inventive collaborator for Honey and Smoke, a world artist neighborhood and platform centered on creating area for artists to meditate on the essential themes of our time. H&S explores these themes via spearheading inventive inquiry, training, interactive experiences, and digital content material.
My apply explores how people throughout the African Diaspora and Latin America search pleasure and goal, whereas reflecting on themes of neighborhood, ancestry, and colonial historical past. Most profoundly, I examine the connection between the interior little one and grownup self, creating from an intersectional, femme, and Afro-Diasporic perspective. By way of portray, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, set up, and efficiency, I pursue pleasure via the usage of brilliant, vibrant hues that problem perceptions of actuality and trauma, increasing how we relate to ourselves, others, and the world round us. I additionally make use of colours to subvert the socio-political situation of invisibility positioned upon Black folks.
Coloration is reminiscence, and transports me to my early childhood within the Dominican Republic within the Nineties, the place I used to be surrounded by vibrantly painted properties. These hues not solely comprise a household’s historical past, however specific the joyous way of life on the island. The oversaturated palette and expressive mark making in my work is each private and political; It evokes uncooked expression, religious channeling, intuitive motion, and emotional honesty. After I entry my rawest state of pleasure, anger, unhappiness, or confusion, that power calls for to be seen in its entirety to ensure that it to be reworked. Coloration, in that state, is undeniably itself. Taking over inventive and emotional area on this method is liberating as a soul positioned inside a Black feminine physique.
I visualize actual, religious, and imaginative areas. My summary work ask of me to maneuver and embody a diasporic historical past as a way to create their marks and go away behind trails of (coded) data. In my representational portray work, by incorporating remnants of the determine (heads, palms, toes) inside abstracted environments, I convey an area by which the physique and the spirit can talk, discover alignment, and reconnect. These extremities act as antennas for goal and spirit and are sometimes depicted and adorned with lengthy lashes, lipstick, and acrylic nails, bodily options that embody inventive expressions of magnificence, self love, and care current in femme communities throughout the African Diaspora and Latin America. At instances, left palms are adorned with inexperienced and brown beaded bracelets referred to as Ide, worn by Ifa practitioners, and that I put on on a regular basis. Ifa is an historic divination system from Yorubaland in West Africa that gives of us with religious data concerning their future and ancestry via a reference to spirit. It’s a apply and lifestyle that has been current within the African Diaspora by means of Transatlantic Slavery.
The colourful, visually layered, expressively marked and energetic loudness of my work is in direct competition with the psychological invisibility that’s positioned upon Black our bodies, Black souls, Black creativity, and Black histories in Eurocentric societies. You will need to me to create works which might be understood by and replicate the experiences of the African Diaspora and Latin American communities, and that demand to be seen, felt, and skilled, as a result of that power is aware of itself and is aware of that you realize it, too.
For this Moosey exhibition I centered on a screenprinted drawing of a Black girl who has simply climbed a palm tree and is relishing in being on the high of it, a bodily and emotionally heightened state. This picture might be seen in two totally different orientations which might be the other way up from each other: One putting the determine on the forefront of the composition, wanting down on the palm tree from above or one other from the attitude of the bottom that sees the determine on the high of the tree. The picture is repeated all through the exhibition however painted in numerous colours and layers of paint. It’s put in amongst a painted forest of palm bushes and graphite drawings that function shadows of streams of consciousness.
The image of the palm tree not solely references the Yoruba story that caused this work, but additionally acts as a logo that connects me and plenty of others to a Caribbean and afro-diasporic heritage in addition to my time residing within the Dominican Republic as a toddler. The palm tree as a logo, character and merchandise of the horizon is omnipresent in 18th and nineteenth century work depicting Caribbean and Latin American enslaved folks and colonies. I’m notably drawn to Dirk Valkenburg’s Ritual Slave Social gathering on a Sugar Plantation in Suriname, 1706, Samuel Raven’s Celebrating the Emancipation of Slaves in British Dominions, 1834 and Julien Vallou de Villeneuve’s Little Grasp that I Love, 1840. Though these work all situate the palm tree as a passive factor of the panorama or portrait, I supply a distinct learn. Its presence acts as a participant/viewer of the image airplane, an observer or a logo of therapeutic and liberation. On the subject of the Yoruba story of the lady and the palm tree it jogs my memory that future is at all times current and able to be climbed.
Presenting the works in La Subida Del Destino (Future’s Climb) on this method function an ode to the private and communal journeys that we take as a way to really feel fulfilled, liberated and finally completely happy. Completely different layers of paint and colours give the work weight, reminiscence and sign a layered expertise. Situating these works amongst a forest of palm bushes highlights the potential power of destinies to return, able to be climbed or destinies not fulfilled due to exterior forces and techniques. This work highlights a journey in direction of self actualization and pleasure. Making work like that is essential to me, to my ancestry and to the neighborhood who’s deeply related to my liberation and evolution in addition to that of marginalized teams. —Eilen Itzel Mena
