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ADA MEDINA: Statement
from the Artist Using mixed media (paper, canvas, pigments, ink, wire mesh, wood, leather and wax) my new work fuses three-dimensional form, painting and drawing. Conceived as allusive elemental forms, these hybrid works, at times suggest functionality. The multiple levels of my work also welcome a multi-dimensional reading rather than a surface one. By mediating seeming oppositions: reference/abstraction, object/presence, poesis/formalism, nuance/rawness, my work considers the implications and continuum existing between polarities. My intent is to regenerate absent or dormant human/natural connections within a contemporary context. I am interested in mnemonic potency, in having my work function as a memory tool that assists the recall of what is essential and collective. Yet while I engage the ineffable and the resonant, I have no interest in creating objects on which to hinge nostalgia or sentimentalized mystery. Instead, my new work aims for connection and shared levels of reality. As such, this work knows no cultural, economic, or temporal boundaries. From the 1970s through the early 1990s, I tended to rely on autobiographical aspects as points of departure for my work. By autobiography, I mean the inescapable facts of my place of birth, first smells, first language, first culture, first encodings, and first struggles. These facts (of chance) are simultaneously gifts and challenges that also provide me a historical view. Traversing multiple borders (i.e. born in the Tex-Mex borderlands to working-class immigrants from Mexico, grappling with two languages by age six, raised agnostic in a predominantly Catholic barrio, embracing a lesbian orientation as an adolescent within the U.S.'s culture of compulsory heterosexuality, shifting back and forth between economic classes, formal education within Euro-American institutions, then teaching within affluent institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University and within the economically besieged Institute of American Indian Arts, etc.) makes for an extensive and intensive experience of the fractal. Very early I connected intimately with Coyote, otherwise known as Hermes in Greece. Coyote, that quirky "spirit of the hinge," unfailingly keeps the door open for all sorts of traffic across boundaries. Today I credit Coyote for my work's prismatic gaze and for my life's dexterity with cultural practice. My own border crossings have never been reducible (as may be expected) to collision at the intersections. Rather, I experience border(s) as the alembic, that alchemical retort in which seeming opposites are heated to the breaking point and then transformed into simultaneity. This birthed my own multi-tongued sensibility, a syncretism that always draws the world together for me without melting down my particulars. As such, my work (and my life) questions the "stability" of categorization and resists essentializing ideologies, whatever the political stripe. Capable of existing in between, my art is an art of not quite the insider, nor quite the outsider. Recalling Trinh T. Minh-ha's words, it is more likely an art made by an "inappropriate(d)" other. As an "unexpected other", I experience myself not as anyone's cultural commodity (non-evolutionarily and thus melancholically) fixed in place, but as a being who is engaged in an ever-active process of change and variance. In my experience, this mutable condition wears thin any defining boundaries and can reveal borders as arbitrary, artificial, or non-existent. My own history surely tells me where I have been. Yet, as I continue to grow, I begin to experience all of my identities (each one initially constructed in the crucible of multiple contingencies) as extrinsic and provisional. Reductive and static identities, imposed externally or internally, do not serve my art or life in the deeper and larger way they merit. I know that I am simultaneously as much like others as I am persistently different from them-Trinh T. Minh-ha's "Not you/like you." So I welcome my new works' departure from self-regarding autobiography, and its movement away from the privatized personal. My new work is very curious about growing a self in proportion to finding common ground among others (of course, without the false universalisms). I would be pleased to know that those experiencing my work would first find some shared condition among our selves, rather than only locating an (identi)fied me within my art. Ada Medina © June 2001
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