I am honored to have been invited to participate in SANCOCHO LIVE - A virtual Stew of “Non-Essential” thinkers and makers hosted by The Clemente Center with CUNY Graduate Center, #PRSyllabus, and The Center for Humanities.
I am presenting a video pertaining to my embroidery series, My UnderEmployed Life
A skill that was passed down through generations of factory working seamstresses in Puerto Rico and NYC, My UnderEmployed Life attempts to capture an artists’ idleness during fallow times of modern-day underemployment and convert them into thoughtful, humorous works based on the trappings of “the work of
not working”.
In a years-long “period of meditation on the nature of work” (Susana T. Leval), I channeled my grandmother,” producing a series of intimate images of everyday objects. Prone features an unraveled sofa commonly found in struggling households; Benefit depicts a booklet of food stamps; Control is the worn-out remote of tuned out complacency; Luck is the elusive scratch offs of success.
The Bronx Housing Court Monster is equal parts Dante's Inferno Canto VIII, Tolkien's Barad-dûr, and Attack of The Killer Tomatoes; an overtly anthropomorphized representation of gentrification and whitewashing via the legal system.
A women’s tradition both aristocratic enough for leisure and common enough for labor, these embroideries strive to connect both sides of this history, exploring the inherent archetypes and stereotypes of the process.