iliana emilia García & Scherezade García: Landed

My artwork is deeply rooted in the concept of home, emotional history, and memory, while exploring the notion of material as a signifier. I delve into themes of identity and the strategies artists use to convey their messages, aiming to challenge cultural stereotypes and interrogate constructs of race, ethnicity, gender, and identity. Through my work, I strive to provoke thought and encourage dialogue about these critical issues by using art as a powerful means to reflect and question the world around us.

At the core of my work is a poetic and emotional examination of the history of objects. I explore the value we assign to what we own from the places we come from and that which we keep through life’s journeys and crossroads.

In my previous work, there was a recurrence of piled objects telling a story of resilience, accumulation of stories, and an emphasized focus on memory. I have been emotionally documenting things that trigger and build up my memory and scavenging clues to link humble and ordinary objects to places and emotions that became storytellers of my own story. Recreating a life on their own and defining space, time, and legacy.

The constant repetition of an object allows the subject to become, exist and evolve.
The redundancy does not bring monotony but a time-lapse sequence of a mind in progress and life as it is lived, unpredictable even when planned, and inconsequential even with a purpose.
I write as I draw, and I draw when I write. The words become objects when placed and written and later subjects when read and understood. It's a two-step process; first, one of beauty, and second, one of meaning and comprehension. Is what I see what it means to be? Is meaning significant? Or are placement and representation pivotal to the consequences of the interaction with a sentence?

I only want to marry the image with the words. I imagine the words. When I write them down, they become something else; their meaning is an outer layer. So what do I do to convey everything together? Three complete individual tasks are what I imagine, how they look, and what they mean. I intend to merge my three realities and instruments into one: the art (drawing words), the object, and the reason.

Do I read to understand? Or to enjoy the beauty of the language? Do I draw for you to recognize the object or make it yours and create your own story? Do you read to find solace and refuge? Do you look at paintings to inhabit a new world and make it yours?

I paint to tell stories that become yours when you become part of the conversation. When, and if it would do, it touches you, plants a question or questions a thought, awakes thinking, or becomes a genuine or imaginary mirror of your existence, the real or the desired one. I don't paint to depict objects but to face and confront matters of longing, melancholy, emotional distance, elation, displacement, encounters, settlements, paths, ways, and remembrances.

I use coffee as the primary paint medium in my most recent series. Coffee alludes to home, place, and human interaction and indicates layered interpretations, remembrances, and movements. In bringing in domesticity with aroma and warmth, my work becomes a constant retelling of a past that keeps shifting, surprising us and inviting us to look deeper into human nature.

On canvas and installations, my compositions emanate mappings of ancestry and personal history. They speak of human movements, migration, and constant evolution. They offer piles of stories to add to our present and create a chain of events, documentation, and intergenerational dynamics. They make us aware of the pockets of resilience among trauma and grief and solidarity amid injustices. It's a constant search for certainty for a definitive understanding that will outlive the experience.

I live that I know. And I will always remember until I forget. Or I will never forget until I can not

remember. Either way, I may always know.