Daisy Quezada Ureña: Quihica

Pie Projects Contemporary Art is thrilled to present Quihica, multidisciplinary artist Daisy Quezada Ureña’s first solo exhibition.

Known for works that examine issues of identity, place, immigration, and systemic violence, Quezada Ureña works in the mediums of ceramic, installation art, and artist books informed by her Mexican and American heritage. The themes of gender inequality, labor, and class issues that inform her practice take on a more personal tone in her latest exhibition.

The term 'quihica,' from which the exhibit gets its name, stems from German polymath Alexander von Humboldt’s investigation into the customs of the ancient, Indigenous inhabitants of Bogotá, who used the term to refer to victims of ritual sacrifices. The designation meant the deaths of the ritual victims opened a new cycle of 185 moons (approximately 15 years). The term was later used by Uruguayan writer and journalist Eduardo Galeano to refer to the possibilities open to an individual as they transition from this life to the afterlife.

In her previous work, Quezada Ureña often used donated garments from people on both sides of the U.S./Mexican border, which she coated in porcelain and fired at high temperatures, burning away or dissolving the organic fabric so only traces of them, or imprints remained. Her new work is related but distinct in that the garments used for her mixed media sculptures are her own.

Quihica is a personal portrait, in that sense, of the artist and her memories, of which clothing carries a reminder. Sacrifice, in this sense, becomes an open-ended narrative of shifting identity, the shedding of old skins, as well as a condemnation of the societal constraints that force change.

The pair of blue jeans in her piece to do something of consequence, no.1, for instance, are fixed in a permanent state by the firing process that hardens the porcelain and bound by ratchet straps. One could take its meaning in a number of ways, including as a symbolic reference to the societal pressures of fixed gender identity as the straps that bind.

But, also, each transmogrified garment represents an individual (in this body of work, Quezada Ureña’s) and an intimate connection is forged between viewer and artwork, audience and artist.

“There’s definitely a sense of what it means when one is sacrificed, and what the body becomes in those sacrificial moments, whether those moments are heavy and difficult and hard to endure or relieving, as a release from something building up inside us,” she says. “I use garments or textiles, because they tend to carry our identity or person or history with them.”