Gallery Show: the SPace Between
Exhibit by Michelle Cortez Gonzales

—
Statement from the Artist

This body of work reflects an amalgam of family history and fragmented memory. I reference personal photographs, Texas flora and elements of my innate Mexican-American culture as a means to reclaim and preserve the threads of my own ancestry.

My process resonates with the way I physically and metaphorically interlace my materials and ideas. I stitch various fabrics together as a symbolic gesture of connecting a memory to a history. Sewing and stretching creates an inherent unpredictability that reveals the complexities and imperfections of a nebulous recollection. I paint over warps and buckles of the fabric with family photographs and vague memories. Eliminated and embellished imagery alludes to fabricated stories distorted by time, discrepancy of individualized perspectives, or the lack of storytelling.

By painting from photographs and fracturing the composition, I consider the contrast of belonging to something and nothing at the same time. I attempt to navigate my place within my ancestry against a forgotten legacy. As I reconstruct a history, my work begins to occupy a liminal space of illusion and reality; erasure and recovery; celebration and separation; the known and unknown.