OPENING IN JULY
CLOSING RECEPTION Saturday, August 12, 2017
TXMX
DANIELA CAVAZOS MADRIGAL | ANALISE MINJAREZ | SARITA WESTRUP
July 15 – August 12, 2017
Kirk Hopper Fine Art (3008 Commerce Street) is pleased to present a three-person exhibit featuring artists Daniela Cavazos Madrigal (San Antonio), Analise Minjarez (Denton), and Sarita Westrup (Dallas). The show opens on July 15 and runs through August 12, with a closing reception from 6.00 – 8.00 p.m., Saturday, August 12.
Using unconventional materials such as cement, wire, and discarded textiles, artists Daniela Cavazos Madrigal, Analise Minajrez, and Sarita Westrup tackle issues of migration, cultural identity, and the fracturing of our communal fabric. All three artists grew up in border towns of Texas and each explores the truths of the migrant trajectory.
Daniela Cavazos Madrigal sources discarded clothing from warehouses in her native Laredo (which sells mounds of clothing by the pound) and embroiders lyrics from popular corridos, Mexican narrative themed ballads about oppression and daily life. Madrigal doesn’t view these items as just clothing but as deeply personal artifacts that are symbolic of identity and shelter, and as stand-ins for the human body. Daniela states, “My body of work is built around the illusive notion of the American Dream.” The understanding that inequity is systematic and difference is often met with hostility is the driving force behind the conception her work.
Analise Minjarez incorporates found objects, textiles, and native crops to evoke a minimalistic aesthetic that echos the beauty and fragility of life on desolate borderlands. Most recently, Minijarez has been exploring the ideas of nets as both a textile binding technique and as a symbol for the sky and stars shared between two countries. Analise states, “I engage in the repetition of net making to contemplate both the tension necessary to create the knots of a net and the social strain between people living on separated land. In addition, the net, although commonly perceived as a barrier, provides portholes of cultural and social understanding.”
In addition to using natural found material, Sarita Westrup experiments with man-made materials such as plastics, cement, and wire, materials that can all be found peppered throughout the border landscape. Westrup casts plastic water bottles and jugs out of cement, evoking sentimental offerings to those who have made the journey across the border. Westrup’s materials reference Mexican American identity and border trafficking, and question stability along the border region.
Propagate tells a story that begins with the primordial formation of dirt particles that traveled through light, water, air, and time, to find themselves in this new composition. For the artists, compressed earth is representative of a building system whose roots are ancient and whose benefits are great but generally unrecognized, misunderstood and under-researched. This work is inspired by a belief in the potentials of earth construction as a revived and modernized art, re- engineered for durability. Earth, stabilized with a small percentage of cement, finds its form and strength through confinement and curing. Earthen cubes are arranged in a self-organizing phyllotactic pattern, an array which naturally emerges in dynamic biological systems. Linking a terrestrial material with the rationality of form, “Propagate” is a bridge between past and future, mystery and logic, and above all, harmony and earth.
