MULTI is a virtual exhibit curated by The Projecto's Coka Treviño which will be featured in The ESB MACC's annual La Mujer celebration!
MULTI, curated by Coka Treviño, tries to express a few of the many dream-states that our life as Mexican and Mexican American women have internalized in and outside of contemporary colonialism, and how we're collectively trying to unlearn and find our own, authentic voices.
Poet and writer Ariana Brown; Photographer and Designer Patricia Carrington; Performer and Video artist Fina Ferrara; Contemporary artist and visual activist Irene Antonia Diane Reece; and experimental video and sound artist Natalia Rocafuerte provide us with different views of Mexicanidad and the Latinx experience.
Multidisciplinary, Multifaceted, Multicultural; Resilient Artists that have grown, reached, and accomplished trusting their own strengths, and resources. Womxn that have dared to dream a different life.
View the digital exhibition below, featuring Ariana Brown, Patricia Carrington, Fina Ferrara, Irene Antonia Diane Reece, and Natalia Rocafuerte.
Ariana Brown
Ariana Brown is a queer Black Mexican American poet from the Southside of San Antonio, Texas. Ariana holds a B.A. in African Diaspora Studies and Mexican American Studies from UT Austin as well as an MFA in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh. She is the recipient of two Academy of American Poets Prizes and a 2014 national collegiate poetry slam champion. She has been writing, performing, and teaching poetry for ten years.
Ariana's work investigates queer Black personhood, affirmation and care for Black gender marginalized people, and loneliness. In January 2020, Ariana released Sana Sana, her debut poetry chapbook from Game Over Books. She has also recorded a digital EP titled LET US BE ENOUGH, available on Bandcamp.
Ariana has performed her work and led writing workshops across the country at venues such as the Killeen Natural Hair and Health Expo, Harvard University, Tucson Poetry Festival, and the San Francisco Opera Theatre. When she is not onstage, she is probably eating an avocado, listening to Brandy, or validating Black girl rage in all its miraculous forms.
Ode to Thrift Stores
Written & Performed by Ariana Brown | Starring Ariana Brown & DJQ | Produced, Directed, & Edited by mylkweed & Ariana Brown
Ode to the City Bus
Written & Performed by Ariana Brown | Filmed by Robert "Chibbi" Orduna |Produced by Button Poetry
For the Black Kids in my 8th Grade Spanish Class
Written & Performed by Ariana Brown | Filmed by Robert "Chibbi" Orduna | Produced by Button Poetry
Patricia Carrington
Multidisciplinary Visual Artist graduated from the Faculty of Visual Arts of the Autonomous University of Nuevo León.
Her work has been inclined towards photography, graphics, installation and video. The fascination for observing the world has led her to rethink the everyday as a starting point where anything can happen. Questioning reality, photographing dreams and exploring the infinite imaginary that accompanies the human, are the constant lines of work in her work.
Serie, Ejercicios de atención efocada
Ejercicios de atención enfocada arises in times where home becomes the safest landscape, where routine actions flex to become events worthy of analysis. Patricia Carrington proposes, open ears, sharpen eyes and take off on the fly.
Fina Ferrara
Mexican performer and video artist. Fina Ferrara has performed in MARCO Museum, MUNE Museum, EL CENTENARIO Museum, and FAMA Contemporary Art Fair, in Monterrey, Mexico. She has also exhibit photographic registry of her performances in ART3F International Contemporary Art Fair in Paris (2019), Gaudi Gallery in Madrid, Spain (2019 and 2020), Marbella Contemporary Art Show (2020), as well as in Puerta Rosa Museum in Mexico (2020).
Some of her video art pieces have been shown in Bogota Experimental Film Festival in Colombia, Fringe Arts Festival in Philadelphia, NoNation ArtLab in Chicago, FIVA Almagro in Spain, VIDEOBARDO in Argentina, and for Agite y Sirva Touring Festival presenting in Mexico City, Oaxaca, and Puebla, Mexico, and in Paris, France.
Fina is well known for her ability to capture the viewer ́s attention, transporting the audience to those uncomfortable places that induce to questioning social structures and standards, as well as the senseless suffering of human existence.
TRANSDUCCIÓN
Folding inward defending from harm, our sensory receptors and nervous system tauten to the minimum stimuli. Video performance selected for PERFORED, lockdown cycle 2020.
NIGREDO
A video art created for the performance PALIMPSEST premiered in Museum El Centenario January 2020, Mexico. A collaboration between visual artist Miriam Medrez, performer Fina Ferrara, and video artist Raúl Quintanilla. Nigredo is the first step in the pathway to the philosopher's stone. Meaning putrefaction or decomposition, it is the start for transformation. It holds and releases in order to construct itself within the boundaries of its own desire.
CITRINITAS AND RUBEDO
A being contained in a digital world has lost the sense of itself. Bewildered and confused, it fights to free itself, but there is a price to pay. Disconnecting implies re-inventing a new reality. Citrinitas, the solar dawn or awakening, and Rubedo, the fourth and final stage in alchemical success, is a video art created during quarantine by Fina Ferrara in collaboration with video artist Raúl Quintanilla.
Irene Antonia Diane Reece
Irene Antonia Diane Reece, identifies as a contemporary artist and visual activist. Born and raised in Houston, Texas. She earned her BFA in Photography and Digital Media and MFA in Photography and Image-making. This year Reece is a recent recipient of Black Rock Senegal Residency in Dakar, Senegal and will be exhibiting at the 5th Biennale Internationale de Casablanca, in Casablanca, Morocco, and their solo exhibition Home-goings at Galveston Art Center, in Galveston, TX.
Reece’s photographic works, appropriated films, usage of text, and found objects create an insight into her world. The topics surrounding her work are racial identity, African diaspora, social injustice, family histories, re-memory, mental and community health.
I know we don’t talk about it but we should.
You Know We Are Related?
I Have Always Been Told I Have Bad Hair & Malo pelo no. 2
Blanqueamiento no. 1, 2, and 3
Food For Thought
Natalia Rocafuerte
Natalia Rocafuerte is a xicanx experimental video and sound artist exploring dreams as narratives of self. Rocafuerte has exhibited at the 2018 Young Latinx Artists at Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin, TX as well as being featured in Remezcla for "Top 40 Latinx Texas Artists to Know in 2020". Natalia is interested in the phenomenology of dreams, video aesthetics, experimental mediums, rasquachismo and waking life. She grew up on both sides of the Rio Grande Border in Tamaulipas and Texas and became a naturalized USA citizen in 2019.
Four Immigrant Womens Dream
Using radical empathy, rasquache aesthetics and non-hericharchal media process, Four Immigrant Womens Dream synthesizes an experimental colective concious. Using a toll free dream hotline, the collected dreams create a stream of visual symbols exploring analog video synthesis, found footage and personal archives.
About the curator:
Coka Trevino
Coka Treviño was born and raised in Monterrey, Mexico, currently residing in Austin, Texas.
She started working at the Museum of Contemporary Arts of Monterrey supporting the Exhibitions department, in 2004, since then, Treviño has worked for art galleries, museums, and universities, and has held every position imaginable in the industry, both in Monterrey and Austin, curating being her main focus.
In 2009 she founded The Projecto looking to facilitate cultural exchange with different cities and artistic expressions, hosting international artists and collaborating with different local institutions to enable dialog and community enrichment. Currently, she’s working as an independent curator, a Co-curator, and Project Manager for Graham Reynold and Golden Hornet's MXTX, Board Member of Unlisted Projects Artist Residency, and the Curator and Director of Programming at Big Medium.