Saakred

 Reimagining Aztlán: Phase Two

A Virtual Utopia, A Virtual Playground

On View
March 8 - April 12, 2024
The Projecto
Austin, Texas

https://www.theprojecto.org/art/aztlan

Reimagining Aztlán is a comprehensive body of work (in progress) challenging the peripheral influence of the 1969 conceptualization of Aztlán as written in the Plan de Espiritual Aztlán. Using the bicultural semiotics of the current region of South Texas, Northern Mexico and the borderlands, this work aims at redefining Chicanidad through a vibrant, visual inclusion of new narratives. Phase one, A Lowrider Car Hood Series is a series of custom, lowrider car hoods that places new Latinx narratives at the forefront through the utilization of the same traditional aesthetics of high gloss, airbrushed scenes of an imagined utopia rooted in Pre Colombian iconography and Latinx hypersensuality. Modernized through a fabrication and production process that utilizes newer technologies such as digital painting and vinyl wrapping, these custom car hoods hang in the white cube as a pristine and undisturbed work to challenge the understanding of “The New American Painting”.

Phase Two, A Virtual Utopia, A Virtual Playground is the second phase of this conceptualization of Aztlán, a utopian landscape free of the burdens of late stage capitalism and welcoming to society’s most discarded. Using new technologies such as volumetric photogrammetry, 3D modeling, texturing, character building and 3D printing, A Virtual Utopia, A Virtual Playground presents a virtual illustration of Aztlan, previewing the geological, architectural, and relational components of the artist’s world-building. Pulling from a diversity of influences such as the architecturally significant world-building of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica or the research-based NASA proposals of the late Argentinian artist Gyula Kosice, the artist pulls from a vast database of art historical figures/movements to create their own vision of utopia in a larger search for the semiotics of Aztlán. Using the aesthetics of Pixar and Disney the viewer is welcomed into an immersive space where the line between the digital and material blur into liminality. Like the existence of borderland walkers or what sociologist Gloria Anzaldúa names nepantla, the work imagines a borderless region marked by the real, lived environment of the artist- an influence of desert landscapes, resilience and rasquachismo.