TERESITA CARSON VALDEZ

Title:  she, who is seen and unseen, buried and unburied, yearns for her temple

Year: 2024

Dimensions: 20 ft W x 20 ft. H x 6 ft. D

Medium: Multi-media installation

Materials:

Ruins in reverse

Smuggled scans

Hollow monoliths

The Mother of the Sun, Moon and Stars, scanned, carved, sliced and stacked

Glyphs

Serpents

Claws

Shaders, meshes, wireframes, and geometries

Fragments and shards

In tlilli, in tlapalli

Archival pigment prints

Codex Tezcatlipoca (Fejérváry-Mayer) Folios 1, 15, 16, 18, 19 and 44

Resin, clay

Wool, cotton

Medium Density Fiberboard, polyurethane

Code, celluloid

time.deltaTime

Keyframes

Screens

Tonalpohualli

The counting of days

Memory

Ancestors’ invocations and divinations

Multi-visions

The past

The future

Ixiptla

Title: What Is It That They Make Pregnant, Big with Child, in the Dancing Place?

Year: 2024

Medium: Installation (wool, cotton, dye, metal, ceramic, wax) 

Title : Kill Hole

Year: 2024

Medium: Sculpture—porcelain, metal

12 ft. long, 8” wide x 8” deep)

Codex Huípil

Installation (site specific)

Year: 2023

Dimensions: 17” by 50’

Archival pigment print on film, plastic cord, metal grommets

Images were created in 3D modeling software from scans made at the National Museum of Anthropology.

Transmedial installation (2023)

Dimensions variable, gallery space is 24’ W by 13’ D by 14’ H

Materials: archival pigment prints, MDF, polyurethane, resin, wood, paint, video, monitors, sound

Title comes from a quote in Bishop Diego de Landa’s 1565 book,“Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán.”

It reads: “We found a huge number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.”

Two-person exhibition at Heaven Gallery with Cydney Lewis (2022)

Terrain vague is defined as an urban, empty or abandoned space in which events have taken place. It’s deceptively free, available, and unengaged. Think of a closed public school or an empty lot between two houses. What is to be done with these enormous voids, with their imprecise limits and vague definitions? In these overlooked places, the present is obfuscated by the memory of the past. Within a futurism context, I seek to expand on what terrain vague can be—to reflect on potential meanings of non-places.

Multi-media installation (2021)

Video, chain link fence, stone, paint, pick hammer, plastic, fibers, wire

I am fascinated by the concept of the antimonumento (anti-monument), which was created by the people of Mexico City. An anti-monument is an installation placed at the site of a demonstration. It seeks to memorialize a tragic event in the community’s history and maintain a demand for justice. I have been researching and making work about Mexico’s feminicide problem for years. Nothing I make can measure up to Mexican women’s efforts to demand justice for themselves and the victims. These protests are often led by artist collaboratives and their performative feminism is getting results. Activists all over Mexico continue to intervene and vandalize beloved monuments, forever changing their meaning in the public’s imagination.

I live two blocks away from Washington Park and I see George Washington’s statue every day. I never gave it much thought until after last year’s George Floyd/BLM uprising when I noticed the monument was enclosed by a chain link fence. In this case, the City of Chicago changed its meaning, fearing its destruction by the community. It’s an accidental anti-monument.

Where I Am, Where I’m Not is marked by the complexities of having one foot in one history and the other foot in another. I ask, “How do past and current uprisings for liberation intersect and how can anti-monuments point us to an aspirational futurism? I hope to steer our thinking towards equitable modes of intervention to shape society, and to recover knowledge that will lead us towards self-determination.

Sound Installation (2022)

The initial impulse for this project came from the identarian anxiety that comes from being a product of mestizaje—being either or, neither nor. In realizing that most of my living ancestors were gone, I had to accept I wouldn’t be able to fully trace my ancestry.

The performative provocation of the tape recorder positions it as an ideal device to produce the raw material for musique concrete. I imagine a musique concrete assembled from signal and noise, speech and silence, intelligibility and unintelligibility, meaning and meaninglessness, sense and nonsense

The tape-recorder is regenerative. Tape is susceptible to modification and erasure. Tape embodies continuity and discontinuity—the stopping of time, but also the spreading and layering of the present moment. It allows for the rapid alternation of past, present and future, becoming an image of time. The awareness and possibility of erasure—of loss—is built into tape. I am hoping the sound created by this system will connect me with what I’ve lost, providing raw material I can shape into something new.

Site-specific installation (2020)

Crochet, cotton, acrylic, nylon, lurex, plastic, glitter, spray paint, figurines, cellophane, used clothing, shoes and blankets, paper folders and legal documents, video

The pink crocheted “parasite” is both empowerment and trap, it’s around the corner, over, under, and it envelops everything on its path. Born out of the language of feminine anguish within domesticity (i.e. crochet, decorative figurines, glitter, the color pink), “Parasito” attempts to stir up the duality of gendered grief. It’s all-consuming; at times it’s a symbolic weapon, but mostly it’s an inescapable and suffocating condition. The manipulated video (chief of Mexico City’s police getting glittered during a feminist protest) projected in the back room can be found here: https://vimeo.com/394772667

Installation (2019)

Silk, dye, discharge, thread, wood, metal

The installation A Novena for a Plague consists of nine dyed, bleached, printed and embroidered raw silk hanging panels, each corresponding to one prayer of the novena. This novena is in direct reference to the mythical salvation of Mexico City from the 1736 plague (European diseases killing the indigenous peoples) by the Virgen of Guadalupe, which resulted in her becoming the patron saint of Mexico.

Installation (2018)

Silk, dye, pigment, archival pigment prints, latex, paper, metal, sound

Bling! Is an ongoing, contemporary exploration of the problem of feminicide and aims to highlight the value of women-of-color bodies vis a vis their disposability as result of global market economic policies such as NAFTA. These policies create the perfect conditions for a feminicide machine. More importantly, the project seeks to revive the histories/mythologies of ancient Aztec “monster goddesses” (the tzitzimime) as symbols of resistance and liberation.

Archive pigment print, plastic cord, sound

I took photos all around Chicago of found images of Guadalupe. I returned the image to its original site, Tepeyac in Mexico City, by printing them on a scroll of transparent photographic paper, which ends with a Google Earth image of the site. The scroll is suspended with plastic cord.

Screenprints on canvas, dye, ink, graphite, charcoal, pigment, tape

(2018) Latex, silk, cotton, polyester, dye, pigment, archival pigment prints, foil, metal wire

2018

Cotton, dye, discharge, foil, paper, ink

Installation (2018)

Archival pigment prints, resin, plexiglass, urban debris

T’ho is a multidisciplinary installation that incorporates photography, sculpture and film. By using film projection, large scale photographs, resin casts enclosing bits of images and metal, Plexiglas and lighting, I hope to engage the body into the ongoing violence against sites by not only questioning the scaffolding, but by directing the eye and body downward, towards the earth. The violence against this site goes beyond what is visible. It’s on the verge of becoming a contemporary ruin, held up not only by scaffolding, but also by the dwindling community who fights for its survival.

Photoetchings, chine collée, graphite, charcoal, color pencil

Found 16mm film footage, ink

Assemblages (3) Wood, screws, plexiglass, gaffers tape, plastic ruler, paint samples, paint, graphite pencil, photographs (polaroid, transparencies)