Multidisciplinary artist's performative works interrogate structures of colonialism and border politics.
Above Image: Emilio Rojas, The Lion's Teeth, 2014–2015. Performance-video in stop-motion animation, 8:07 min. Courtesy of the artist.
On View May 11 – August 20, 2023 | Potter Gallery
SECCA is proud to host
tracing a wound through my body, a multimedia exhibition of works by Emilio Rojas. An opening reception with the artist and curator will be held Thursday, May 11 from 5–8pm. Admission is free and open to the public.
VIEW THE EXHIBITION CATALOG
tracing a wound through my body is the first traveling survey of the contemporary and multidisciplinary practice of artist Emilio Rojas (b. 1985 Mexico City). The exhibition brings together works spanning the past decade including live performances and interventions, documents of performance sustained in video and ephemera, photography, sculpture, installation, and poetry. Recognizing the act of tracing dualistically, tracing a wound through my body both reexamines the artist's corpus and reckons with the legacies of colonial and border traumas. For Rojas, such reckoning renders palpable visible and invisible wounds through the radically political instrumentalization of his body.
This exhibition's included works relate to Rojas' migratory experience and his rigorous research- based practice. Drawing upon queer and decolonized methodologies, his performative works interrogate extant structures of colonialism and border politics. The exhibition takes place in a moment in which nativist rhetoric and xenophobic immigration legislation in the United States and beyond deepens wounds already open. Rojas' works not only confront the historical precedents for such trauma, but also speculate upon Chicana cultural theorist Gloria E. Anzaldúa's proposition of the wound transforming into a pathway for healing.
Emilio Rojas: tracing a wound through my body is curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin and organized by Lafayette College Art Galleries, Easton, PA. This exhibition contains nudity.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance, using video, photography, installation, public interventions, and sculpture. He holds an MFA in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Film from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada. As a queer Latinx immigrant with indigenous heritage, it is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration, and poetics of space. His research based practice is heavily influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments. Besides his artistic practice, he is also a translator, community activist, yoga teacher, and anti-oppression facilitator with queer, migrant, and refugee youth.
Below Image: Emilio Rojas, He Who Writes History Has No Memory, 2017-2018. Installation with performance-film. Courtesy of the artist.
