Identidad
Identidad is an exhibition that contemplates two moments that González Quiroz identified in the process of adaptation in her experience as a Latin American immigrant. It is a series of mixed media works that share the same gesture: the fingerprint.
The fingerprint is thought of as an element that symbolizes the phenomenon of migration from different perspectives. First, as a primitive indexical mark of human presence, which is a graphic testimony of its individuality. From its individual quality, it can refer to the control and identification device imposed on the migrant subject, who is subjected to medical, biographical, and economic examinations, to evaluate their suitability to inhabit foreign territories.
The fingerprint operates in this project as a symbol of a mutable identity, which in the case of the migrant subject, configures another person with another identity: a BIPOC identity and a minority identity. At the same time, another identity disappears. Among other things, the professional and social identity disappears, the daily use of the mother tongue and the personality that that language expresses disappear.
The exhibition is made up of two parts that indicate two moments of elaboration of this experience and that propose a transition towards adaptation, from the individual to the community.
I: Days living in Canada
The first part that defines the first work is a series of fingerprints that consist of an account of the days that she had been living in Canada until the moment of the exhibition. Each day corresponds to a fingerprint in ink on paper.
II: Experiments and Compositions on Fingerprints
The second part covers an indeterminate number of works, each of which shares an experimental quality. They are formal composition and rehearsal exercises around the fingerprint, which account for the creative and mutable component in the adaptation process. This part of the project is in the experimental phase, where each finding or solution has different degrees of progress.
One of the characteristics of a successful adaptation process is creativity, understood as a relationship between the subject and the environment. Creativity is the fundamental element to produce adjustments and tests that lead to assimilation and accommodation to the new environment. These are the elements that come together in this part of the project, in which each piece is thought of as a fit test towards a final composition of the experience.
Opening night:
Friday, January 5, 2024, from 7 to 9 p.m.
Gallery hours:
Open every weekend from Saturday, January 6 until Sunday, January 21 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Artist talk:
About the Artist
Isabel Carolina González Quiroz is a Chilean visual artist and psychologist based in Lekwungen Territories (Victoria, B.C.) Her recent work consists of various languages and techniques, focusing on oil painting (plein air of Canadian landscape), prints and textile arts. She dedicates herself to textile design and experimentation and to teaching loom weaving and pre-Columbian tapestry.
Her work as an artist consists of a graphic exploration both in installations and in serigraphic, photographic, and textile procedures, whose forms of diffusion have been collective and individual exhibitions in the Juan Egenau Room of the University of Chile, the Museum of Contemporary Art MAC, BECH Gallery, among others.
Xchanges gratefully acknowledges the support of the Province of British Columbia and the Capital Regional District for our gallery programs.
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