El Rinconcito
El Rinconcito
El Rinconcito is an artist-run space that operates out of my tiny studio apartment. Through this project, I investigate the material culture and memories of the Chicago artist communities. The space, intentionally invisible, sends communications via snail mail and word of mouth only to stay hidden. It is a community-first space that prioritizes artists existing in the margins. Within my home, I hope to offer a space where we can exist in community, lean on each other, and do what we love. El Rinconcito is a place to play, experiment, and dream up better worlds through art.
Exhibitions
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Exhibitions 〰️
Feel The Love finds alternative ways of understanding materiality and process in artmaking. Materials are woven together and transformed into art objects which become manifestations of the artist’s relationship to their practice. But can we truly understand artworks and by extension, artmaking just by looking? Through the deconstruction of museum etiquette (Don’t touch the artwork says the security guard) and the fulfillment of different sensory needs, Feel the Love works to bridge the gap between artists and viewers by pushing the experience in the gallery beyond visual observation
While not all media lends itself to touch, two of the artists’ focus on textiles provide artworks that guide the viewer’s hand through the literal threads that hold the artworks together. Inspired by the archival findings during her visit to The Little Loomhouse in Louisville, Kentucky and her desire to reclaim a craft tainted by colonial powers, Campa’s mathematical calculations produce woven patterns full of bumps and crooked lines. Hamlin-Navias’ book binds pages of chemical and material experiments while their collection of blues is covered in visible stitches, the artist’s meticulous labor laid out in the open to be felt. Jiang, on the other hand, centers touch through dematerialization by using video to project her labor. The gentle task of washing the gelatin and the sounds of running water work to convince us we are holding the object, partaking in the artist’s process as well. This concept is then fulfilled in Jiang’s performance, of the same name, Tenderness, where the artist and participants must melt the frozen gelatin with their continuous touches. The artists in Feel The Love invite you to participate in tactile explorations of their practice so PLEASE TOUCH THE ART!
Participating Artists:
Linye Jiang
Naomi Hamlin-Navias
Arnie Campa
Participating Artists:
Ese Gagoh
Angel Mendoza
Buried and Never Found brings together two sites of connection and memory, the shrine, or altar, and the land, one existing in the private quarters of the home, and the other, in the outdoors. From diasporic dreams and quests of self-discovery, we stumble upon these sites as places to follow the links of the past and the lives of those before us. The exhibition grounds us in spirituality as we reflect on our entangled stories.
Ángel Mendoza materializes the interconnectedness between his family, spirituality, and history in an example of what can be referred to as Mexican-Catholic domesticana. From the hand-knotted and dyed strands in Strung Sky, tiny milagros hang low, holding prayers to the sky, to the ancestors. His practice, informed by his own diasporic experiences as a Mexican-American, reimagines the shrines found in domesticity, the ones our ma’s decorate in kitsch-y clutters of shiny objects and religious imagery. The milagros, and shrines more broadly, invoke the ancestors and our collective memory.
The land is a shrine too. While Mendoza’s work homes in on the domestic as a space of connection, Ese Gagoh’s photographs take us outside to the earth. Gagoh poses the question, where does the earth end and we begin? Their sepia images blend the subject and the land into one composition where edges and boundaries are blurred, where the dirt and fauna that once were the bodies of our ancestors become our bodies now. Like Mendoza, Gagoh’s practice is centered on the spiritual. The leaves dangle from the trees as milagros hang from shrines. We ask the land to carry our prayers with us. The land also holds memory, and it contains our histories, waiting for us to search.
In our search, some questions are left unanswered. Can the shrine mean something to someone who has left behind their religion but not their spirituality? For those of us that are indigenous to the land, is it easier to imagine its embrace? For those of us that are not, does our connection to the land only exist in the homeland? What if we can’t go back, will this land adopt us as one of its own? Will the wind carry our ashes to our elders across the border? What happens when we search but can’t find these connections?
