installations

Eva Wylie is a multi-disciplinary artist with a background in printmaking. She is on the faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, and is a founding board member of Second State Press in Philadelphia, PA. Her work intimates how humanity and its detritus merge in both familiar and unexpected ways. Her compositions are compressed within frames and expand across large wall spaces to create conversations between nature and artifice, the organic and the synthetic, and the present and the past.

Las Hermanas Iglesias is the collaborative team of Lisa & Janelle Iglesias, sisters born to Dominican and Norwegian immigrants in Queens, NY. The collective’s moniker anchors their identity within the contexts of feminism, teamwork, and multiplicity. For the past 15 years, the two have maintained an interdisciplinary, category-blurring collaboration alongside their individual practices. Las Hermanas undertakes their collaboration while living in different cities, usually through formal and informal residencies and extended on-site collaborative installations. Their practice has evolved to include a number of team efforts and variations such as our further collaboration with their mother, Bodhild. The team’s collaborative work has been exhibited at the Blanton Museum, El Museo del Barrio, Queens Museum, Abrons Art Center, ASU Art Museum, NMSU Art Museum, The Utah Museum of Fine Arts and others. Las Hermanas has been artists in residence at LMCC’s Paris program (France), Fanoon: Center for Print Research at VCUQ (Qatar), The New Roots Foundation (Guatemala) and the Textile Arts Center (US). Lisa Iglesias is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Art Studio at Mount Holyoke College and Janelle Iglesias is an assistant professor at University of California San Diego.

Starting with the creation of Myspace, I delve into my history with loneliness and the new "Social Photo" as defined by social media theorist, Nathan Jurgensen. Thinking about our new form of communication and the history of the photograph, I look at how the work of photographers Nan Goldin and Bill Owens approach truth in their work. Comparing our common desire for connection to an image that depicts an honest reality, I approach my work as a photographic installation artist with the background of social media. Equating this form of experience to the creation of the Disneyland theme park, viewed as the crux of the new social image, I examine how experience is upheld on social platforms that perpetuates loneliness, boredom, and consumerism in our app-obsessed time of post truth, and how those thoughts can change if we learn from those experiences and sit with our difficult emotions.

I use my art practice to express the dualities, issues, questions, feelings and conflicts of a bi-national, bi-culture, and bi-language woman identity - pain, belonging, struggles, cultural loss, self-esteem, acceptance, and inclusion. My practice transports the audience into the experience of being in my world - emotionally and physically - by utilizing Painting, Installation, Sculpture, and Photography. This is portrayed by using elements such as body language, facial expressions, objects, shadows, and nature. My use of iconography is important to represent both the Mexican and American cultures, inspired by the symbolic metaphors of Frida Kahlo. My depiction of dualities is influenced by Cindy Sherman and Ana Mendieta. The colors used in the work reference the national flags, culture and emotions. The materials, such as tissue paper and paper mache, interpret the Mexican handicraft and piñatas, and chicken wire and wire fences relates to the barbed wire and fence of the U.S. and Mexico border. In the U.S., some of these issues are shared between the Chicanx, Latinx, immigrants, women, and minority communities. My work, as well as this paper, decolonizes art and is made to represent the people that resonate with it.

What is reality? To most people it is what you see with your eyes, what you hear with your ears, what you can touch, taste, and smell. Reality is what you sense of the external world that exists independently from your internal mind. The senses relay data to the brain via the nervous system and perceptions are formed. We consider our perceptions of reality to be an accurate depiction of how the world really is. But what if its not as simple as that? I am interested in perception as it is fundamentally related to both the human experience and art.

Using excess, decoration, kitsch, camp, dress-up, drag, anxiety, crying, and humor is how I navigate my life. I want to gently poke fun at adulthood, by relating and confessing how I'm doing it wrong. The camper is the stage for my "home" and all of the glittered thrift store objects stand in for nice new ones. In paying for materials and my time, I probably could have just as well bought the pretty new version at the big box store. But do they accept my jumbo-sized checks?

This essay reflects on the history of structures that divide humans from the landscape and each other. It investigates the physical experiences of disconnection as well as the associated language and stories that shape a relationship to the environment. Research of social sculpture, disengagement and late wave environmental artists are the tools used to support a deeper investigation of the legacy of Johnny Appleseed. The work includes the process of beginning of 50 apple seedlings, sprouted and nurtured in the studio, and a participatory gallery installation of narratives that draw attention to land use, ownership and the migratory nature of both plants and humans. A composition of sculpture, book and interaction highlights aspects of this relationship that might go unnoticed but have profound consequences on our culture.