site specific installation
vinyl, paint
9’ h x 36’ w
2012
 
I designed Nepantla as an Alcove wall-drawing installation at the New Mexico Museum of Art. Nepantla, a Nahuatl word, translates to en medios:  the space between, neither here nor there, neither one nor the other. Inspired by the work of Chicana writer and scholar Gloria Anzaldúa, Nepantla is both a process and a cultural space:  the process is one of becoming, of embodying and dissolving; the cultural space is one of consciousness and resistance to finite, linear reading. 
 
Nepantla takes as a starting point the concept of “as above, so below;” clouds become thickets which become tangles of roots and foliage. The shapes of earth, plant, flower are nearly indistinguishable from butterfly, moth, and snake, which in turn morph into wind, cloud. Once a viewer steps inside, they can’t see the whole work; it’s no longer static. Rather, it becomes a time-based experience of the space between; Nepantla.