近距离内射合集

Kelly Tapia-Chuning takes apart old serapes, those colorful woven blankets found across Mexico and the Southwestern 近距离内射合集 States. Sounds simple enough, right? But what she finds inside is far from simple.

Her exhibition at Kouri + Corrao consists of deconstructed serapes. Some of the patterns and weaving techniques in these textiles are Indigenous. But the yarn used to weave them comes from domesticated sheep introduced by the Spanish, and the Saltillo serapes she uses 鈥� the ones with the large, diamond-shaped central designs 鈥� were originally worn as status symbols by wealthy Spanish and mestizo landowners in colonial Mexico.

The history is tangled.

Tapia-Chuning wants to untangle it, literally. So, she dismantles large portions of the serapes, thread by thread, and nails them to the wall like animal hides or vivisected frogs. She likens this disassembling process to the process of unlearning of colonial ideologies.

鈥淲ithin my practice, the serape is reimagined as a site of decolonization,鈥� she writes in her artist statement. Tapia-Chuning identifies as a 鈥渕ixed Xicana artist with Indigena ancestry,鈥� and she thinks of her work as an attempt 鈥渢o heal ancestral trauma and reconnect with long-forgotten familial histories and cultural roots.鈥�

The two most common ways to make art are by addition or subtraction. Most paintings are additive: you start with a blank canvas and keep adding paint. Some painters scrape away layers, which is subtractive. Welding is additive. Carving is subtractive.

Generally speaking, these processes are value-neutral. But when the thing you鈥檙e subtracting from is a work of art in its own right, that鈥檚 a different story. To gouge out the eyes of the saints in a church fresco, as 8th-century Byzantine iconoclasts did, is a radical act of protest quite different from simply chipping away at a block of quarried marble.

And whether we鈥檙e talking about Robert Rauschenberg鈥檚 鈥淓rased de Kooning Drawing鈥� (1953) or Ai Weiwei鈥檚 鈥淒ropping a Han Dynasty Urn鈥� (1995), any work of art that鈥檚 made by defacing, destroying or removing parts from an existing work is inherently iconoclastic. It鈥檚 an act of negation.

There鈥檚 an iconoclastic element to Tapia-Chuning鈥檚 work 鈥� a physical undoing 鈥� but if she only wanted to destroy the serapes, she could have simply burned them in a pile or chucked them into an industrial shredder. Instead, she keeps the central motifs intact while removing blocs of yarn in sections. She works with the precision of a paleontologist at a dig, because she believes there are hidden histories in the textiles worth uncovering and preserving.

If you鈥檝e ever eaten an entire, on-the-bone fish, you know how peeling back the layers of something can reveal its inner structure. When Tapia-Chuning cuts away the horizontal lines of yarn, she reveals the 鈥渂ones鈥� of the serape. In a purely formal sense, it鈥檚 not that different from Sol LeWitt calling attention to the structure of a cube by removing its outer edges, piece by piece.

But Tapia-Chuning also reveals hidden materials that represent precolonial Indigenous technologies, and this is where her approach departs drastically from LeWitt鈥檚. While he wanted to drain art of all personal, emotional and narrative meanings, Tapia-Chuning uses similarly formulaic methods of subtraction, but they have the opposite effect.

Saltillo serapes were traditionally woven using a tight, weft-faced tapestry technique, where the colorful wool yarn completely obscures the natural beige cotton twine of the vertical warp. Hand-spun cotton twine and other plant-based fibers have a long history of use in precolonial Mexico, so by removing the 鈥渃olonial鈥� wool and excavating the 鈥淚ndigenous鈥� twine that we wouldn鈥檛 otherwise see, Tapia-Chuning recovers a suppressed material culture. This is dissection as discovery, removal as reclamation.

And then there are the stains.

In the process of revealing the twine, she also reveals the stains caused from the serape getting wet and the dye from the colorful yarn bleeding into the cotton. Without her intervention, those stains would have remained hidden.

Did someone spill something on these serapes? Is that why the ink bled? Were they used as tablecloths or ponchos? Did someone take them to the beach? Whether they were taken for granted or cherished, we know they were reused many times, and they served multiple functions. They were part of people鈥檚 homes. They were cozy.

There鈥檚 a sacred transference that happens when someone lives with an object on a daily basis, isn鈥檛 there? Something of that person seems to go into the object. This doesn鈥檛 have to be a woo-woo concept. Mattresses and sofa cushions bear the physical imprints of the people who used them. Clothes smell like the people who wore them.

But when you inherit a sweater or a jacket from a loved one who died, then try it on, don鈥檛 you feel as though you鈥檙e stepping into their body, in a sense, and inhabiting their world for a moment? Material objects can unlock our somatic empathy and help us feel connected to the people who used those objects regularly.

Tapia-Chuning鈥檚 reductive method, her stripping away of layers, does not leave us with empty structures. In the lines of beige twine, we see sunbursts and ombres and splotches of color 鈥� the indexical traces of family picnics and camping trips and being tucked into bed at night as a child. We feel the presence of real people鈥檚 real lives. These are objects that were worn, touched, slept under, carried around and passed from person to person.

Tapia-Chuning鈥檚 art does not feel cold or dry, even when her methods are. What looks like a dismantling is really a means of uncovering forgotten stories, both recent and ancient. What looks like negation is really a spiritual restoration. She cuts away the outer cloth to reveal the inner soul.

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the 近距离内射合集. He covers visual art, music, fashion, theater and more. Reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com or on Instagram at .