Invisible Suffering (Exhibition Catalogue) by D. Aldrete

INVISIBLE SUFFERING

DIANA ALDRETE

INVISIBLE SUFFERING

In Gratitude

Thank you to the Human Rights Studies Program and the Arts Initiative for helping to bring the exhibit to Trinity College. Thank you to Christina Heatherton and Benjamin Carbonetti for organizing this event. Thank you to Maritza "Ritz" Ubides for organizing the space for the exhibit and to Jesse Riley for opening the doors of Austin Arts for this exhibit. Diana Aldrete

THE SERIES Invisible Suffering is a series of original paintings that began as an urgent creative response to the many accounts amounting in the year 2020, including but not limited to: the consequences of a pandemic, white supremacy, femicides, indigenous rights violations, and changes in our climate, just to name a few. The intention of this art project is to invite dialogue in community, to question the invisible suffering enmeshed in one year and that carries a historical resonance, to build a visual elegy for the lives lost in 2020, and to use the language of art to make present the many voices in my research. The works featured in Invisible Suffering are a new body of work made possible by the Free Center’s Independent Artist Fund. This project begins with a provocation to hold space for emotional understanding of pain and possible imaginings for future action. 3

INVISIBLE SUFFERING

It fuses my artistic visual expression with my academic research and interests on border studies, gendered violence in Latin America, and environmental and social justice to examine how we can process the world. I invite the spectator to come closer and look beyond the layers of metaphorical suffering, to therefore ask how we can collectively build on a politics of healing. Through abstraction, this art project comments on how suffering can become invisible if we fail to pay attention to the patterns and refuse to take a deeper look at toxic systems affecting our society. By actively dissecting the layers, we can use art to teach us how to make sense of the complexities of the world and begin acts of collective care so we may imagine and build better futures. This art project also undertakes a queer and feminist praxis (theory put into practice) in my methodology and in the process of Invisible Suffering’s exhibition. That is, being cognizant of the labor of women (especially women of color) and intentionally highlighting the work produced by Black, Indigenous, and people of color.

"X MARKS THE SPOT"

“X Marks the Spot” starts with the poem “Coordinates” to tie us to a sense of space and time. I wanted to start with a visual reference of violence to any point of contact, reminding us how in one way or another we are connected to a network of violence; be it historical accounts of exploration, conquest, occupation, war, or migration. In researching the art of mapmaking, I was faced with acknowledging the way that humans have historically made sense of the physical world. And how this idea has had political and even colonial implications.

"BRUSHED BY FIRE"

From the Fall 2019 until March 2020, Australia suffered the worst brush fire in its country’s history. The record dry weather also affected the western United States, the great basin, and rocky mountain region of the United States. “Brushed by Fire” is a testament to the start of 2020, as we saw the skies full of smoke, and a ring a fire seen from satellite images. “Brushed by Fire” is a warning of what our (human) activity is creating on this earth. Even as some societies push for cleaner energy, we must look at how our interventions are also affecting the environment in other ways.

"IF WATER WAS A MUSCLE"

2020 registered ten oil spills around the world. Inspired in part by the aerial views of images from Iceland’s glacial rivers and the publication in 2020 of the book Anatomica: The Exquisite and Unsettling Art of Human Anatomy I wanted to focus on the value of water. What if, we considered water a muscle that is necessary for our survival? “If Water was a Muscle” depicts a current of water engulfed by the ever-present oil spills.

"COMPOUNDED OPPRESSION"

“Compounded Oppression” brings into dialogue intersectionality as it relates to oppression. I bring to the forefront the deaths of transgender and gender nonconforming people in 2020 – the highest number of fatalities in a single year, according to the Human Rights Campaign. In this painting, the inversion is to express the oppressive weight that people must endure from all their different identities that are subject to oppression: gender, age, race, ethnicity, sexual identity, class, ability, and religion. In her essay “There is No Hierarchy of Oppression,” Audre Lorde pushes us to consider all those intersecting identities on an individual if we are committed to eliminating oppression, “I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.” For Lorde, oppression is inexorably intimate and entangled, “and sit here wondering / which me will survive / all these liberations” (“Who Said it Was Simple”). This inseparability of identity implies that oppression affects us all, as much as liberation connects us. 8

"CRIES FOR LIBERATION"

With a study of the Mapping the Black Lives Matter Movement project and Rose-Lynn Fisher’s book The Topography of Tears (2017) this painting draws inspiration to think of the country’s fight for liberation through Black Lives Matter. I specifically did not want to depict or reference violence on black bodies. Instead, “Cries for Liberation” represents itself as an ink blot Rorschach test for the United States.

"UNWELCOMED EMBRACE"

In thinking the current immigration situation in this country as children are still displaced from their families. As the pandemic began, many still confined into the detention centers in 2020, were subjected to COVID-19. These detention centers gave mylar blankets to children and families as a hospitality courtesy so that they may stay warm. The poem “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus sits at the foot of the Statue of Liberty located at Liberty Island in New York City. For centuries the statue has stood as a symbol of liberty and freedom for the United States. “Unwelcomed Embrace” is an anti-monument. I was inspired to create this piece as a current counter-monument to bring up the failures of the poetic promise that the Statue of Liberty represents.

"A REQUIEM FOR THEIR BREATH"

In “A Requiem for their Dreams,” the masks stand in as a visual elegy for the lives lost, the air that all beings share on this earth, and cognizant of the privileges that many have over access to disposable masks, all while understanding how their disposability will affect our livelihood as they are now pollutants in our earth. From an aerial point of view, the painting calls viewers to look down at the darkened bundle of masks, mixed with the earth, and focus in the center. With a blurred foreground of green brush strokes and orange specs (invoking tree leaves and orange fruit) around the borders of the canvas, the composition of this painting intends to mirror a photographic picture zoomed-in through an opening in a tree’s foliage only to bring into focus an entombment in the middle.

THE ARTIST DIANA ALDRETE Dr. Diana Aldrete is a bicultural, first-generation MexicanSalvadoran-American queer abstract visual artist, writer, and literary scholar. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and raised in Guadalajara, Mexico, her multilayered identity is represented in her creative work and her academic research. She earned her B.A. in Spanish from the University of WisconsinMilwaukee, her M.A. in Hispanic Literature from Marquette University, and her Ph.D. from the University at Albany, SUNY. Her interest in human rights in Latin American literature led her to a dissertation focusing on the representation of the female body in texts concerning the feminicides in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Her areas of research include contemporary Mexican literature and culture, 20th and 21st Century Latinx/Queer representations in Mexican and Latin American narratives, and transnational feminist studies in Latin America. She is currently working on her first manuscript, Between Land and Death: Imagining Justice for Women of Feminicides in Mexico, that expands on her dissertation which examines the questioning of justice in literary texts on feminicidal violence and anti-feminicidal activism in Mexico. Starting Fall 2022, she will be joining Trinity College as Assistant Professor of Language and Culture Studies and Human Rights Studies.

INVISIBLE SUFFERING

Diana Aldrete, "Brushed by Fire," 2022

Exhibited at Garmany Hall in Austin Arts Center at Trinity College Hartford, CT, 2022. Sponsored by the Human Rights Studies Program and the Trinity Arts Initiative.