People, Places and Things/Gente, Lugares y Cosas
ArtStart Gallery, Rhinelander, WI
March 7-May 4, 2024
In Spanish, the word for noun is substantivo, a cognate that implies substance, concreteness, something that can be touched and handled. When I began learning Spanish as a Peace Corps trainee in Ecuador twenty years ago, it was nouns, the words for people, places and things, that I found easiest to grasp. They stayed still, allowing themselves to be examined, rather than shifting around the way Spanish verbs do, changing endings based on who is the subject of the sentence.
Peace Corps service begins with three months of language and technical training, after that, you are assigned to a site somewhere in your country, and that is where you are to live and work for the next two years. The works in this show are inspired by specific people, places and things that I knew intimately during the two years that I lived in my site, Quillin, Loja, as a sustainable agriculture extension volunteer. I arrived with my nouns, an ability to conjugate approximately fifteen verbs, and a lot of trepidation. Everything was strange, and I had to build a worldview from scratch. This was something I had chosen to do, but it was still quite daunting.
I was lucky. As soon as I arrived in Quillin, the people there took me in as their own. They were patient as I blundered through not only the language, but with the new culture, climate and landscape. Gradually, my disorientation dissipated as I adapted and even thrived. This exhibition is both a tribute to the people, places and things in Quillin and the surrounding area, and a visual expression of how it feels to live in a new culture.
The individual works merge materials that I first encountered during my Peace Corps service, such as beads and handweaving, with the handmade paper and embroidery that have anchored my art practice for the last decade. In these hybrid pieces, recognizable images and patterns emerge in some places and are obscured in others, materially expressing the moments of clarity and understanding that develop as an individual adjusts to a confusing new environment. The three piece series Tres Marias is inspired by photos of girls I worked with in the elementary school in town, who had dressed up for the Christmas posada. These three were an angel, the virgin Mary, and one of the three wise men. The pieces also incorporate visual references to the “three sisters” method of growing the corn, squash and beans that everyone in Quillin depended upon for sustenance, as well as the sky, land and waterways of the Andes. The portfolio Quillin pairs small studies with text about life in the village and surrounding area. El Pozo, Piedra de Montana, Hojas, and Murad and the two of the studies refer to places in or near Quillin.
Ultimately, People, Places and Things/Gente, Lugares y Cosas is about human connection to each other and to the material world, something that seems to be diminishing in the age of digital communication and social media. It is also an optimistic exhibition. In a time where division and strife are all we hear about on the national and international news, I am inspired by the knowledge that I was once a foreigner, and a community made me welcome, showing me incredible grace. I have been home for eighteen years and I hope that I have been able to show similar grace to those that arrive here without language or knowledge of American ways, as well as to my fellow Americans.
Funding for this exhibition comes from the Edna Wiechers Arts in Wisconsin Award from the Division of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A fellowship for the 2024 Winter Residency at Penland School of Craft provided the time and space to create the portfolio Quillin.
