My journey through the arts started in 1998, as a way to express cultural separation, after my arrival in the United States. My work pulled its vocabulary from a multitude of sources including the immigrant experience, Latin American culture and above all faith. It transformed into a voyage of discovery, which focused on border and heritage. The visual accumulation of sources allowed me to map a territory of  self decolonization, memory and politics. In this process, I investigated the dismantling of a childhood notion of nationality, and with this idea in mind, I was able to interpret issues from an inside outside perspective.  
      Throughout these years, the concept of establishing a voice through identity oriented works transformed itself into a trap. Identity was a mechanism, in which people wanted me to be perceived the self within an American context. I spent most of my youth submerged in art making and was constantly being encouraged to make art to fit into a category, an artist that could not invent or create one. Growing up with this issue, I became increasingly aware of its limitation and the lack of  a deeper reason that forced me to create narratives to justify the existence of everything. Art was beginning to lose its spiritual value and what used to be pleasure turned into a burden. 
       The series of installations that I have produced serves the purpose to eliminate  the barrier between subject and object. The root of this work lies in the hybrid, across-breeding of visual and physical sources.It is a sponge absorbing all of what is considered mundane accumulation of everyday life.  The objective is to make it into a physical organism living in space. To simply exist, and open a can of possibilities, to let art speak about process independent from the path of the maker. Limitation is the can opener, that allows the work to take its time, nothing is resolved until the space is filled.  
    We live in a world of chaos and order surrounded by an atmosphere of tension and anxiety. My work situates itself within this struggle. The images of made up organisms conflicting against themselves strive towards a fragmented beauty and order, and exists between dimensions, that goes out of control and beyond comprehension.  It is a map adrift in the question of what we really are and where we are heading to. My goal is not to conquer anything or impose a concept, but what I want together with the audience, is to examine and investigate existing obscured thickness of  history, to recollect an open ended mesh of references to multiple stories, past and present.  I am nothing but a person struggling to trace a mark, a tiny fragment of a bolder mark; humanity. History is organic, where the rational and irrational, the abstract and the visceral, the empty and the full, are brought together in a vigorous state of play.







© 2010 Ingrid De Aguiar Sanchez