Jan 30
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
Adaptation, experimentation, and evolution are all crucial concepts within Heidi Brandow’s practice, which usually takes the form of layers of paint, drawing, and paper on canvas, but also includes a social practice in her photography projects.
Jan 30
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
Francoise Barnes’s titles give the viewer a quick point of entry to her abstract, mixed-media paintings on canvas, panel, or paper.
Jan 30
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
Mira Burack’s artwork is a space of rest, contemplation, and the contemplation of rest. Her wall-sized collages of photos of rumpled bedclothes enlarge the space where sleep takes place and, in doing so, enlarge a viewer’s attention to sleep and its landscape.
Jan 30
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
Nicole Cuzilo's photos contemplate the role of fashion and appearance as mechanisms that historically and continually both celebrate and constrain women.
Jan 30
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
Vincent Campos injects a sense of whimsy and strangeness into a form that is often serious and pious. Campos’s retablos stick to this script, representing saints and other Catholic imagery, but his figures have odd or humorous details: a caricatured face, a bag of Wonder Bread.
Jan 30
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
Charming plushy animals walk the razor’s edge between life and lifelessness in Vanessa Gonzalez’s paintings. Each creature—a sloth, a jackalope, a flock of birds—has its limbs wrenched from its tiny body, with threads and fiberfill stuffing poking out of wounds.
Jan 30
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
Dorothy Melander-Dayton is an interdisciplinary artist working at the nexus of performance, theater, and installation, as well as works on paper and sculpture. The artist’s process is grounded in research into various subjects which span artistic influences, texts, material research, and experimentation.
Jan 30
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
In Rosemary Meza-DesPlas’s work, she renders female figures by hand-stitching her own hair into various surfaces. Some of these figures are anguished, some contorted, some vulnerable—each is rendered in delicate, tremulous lines that speak to the traditionally feminine realm of textiles.
Jan 30
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
Martín Wannam’s photos are an explosion of glitter and color, with an underlying hint of darkness. His work is unabashedly queer but operates in response to a repressive heteronormative society encrypted by religious imagery.
Jan 30
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
Heather Gallegos-Rex’s tapestries are strikingly minimal in their design, often incorporating only two or three colors. She leans toward spare geometric shapes but does not shy away from landscapes and increasingly layered compositions.
Jan 30
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
In Yeshe Parks’s gouache-on-paper paintings, figures perform impossible acrobatics. Knees and elbows bend in perfect U-shapes as cartoon-like, faceless characters contort and intertwine themselves into arbitrary postures.
Jan 30
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
Jennifer Vasher’s installations and sculptures evoke the desire for purity and the environmentally toxic consumer culture of cleanliness. Lotion bottles, aspirin, and other pharmaceuticals appear as decorative art objects within the domestic landscapes of her installations.
Jan 30
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
When we first dreamed up the Artists Issue, we thought of it as a way to share—with New Mexico and beyond—a sample of the most vibrant and engaged artists working in New Mexico right now. Artists whose work deserves sustained attention, whether or not you’ve ever heard of them before.
