Post Partum Blues I and II Consanguinidad Virtual/Virtual Consanguinity

Artist Statement

I am interested in filtering abstract painting through a gendered and culturally-specific lens, infiltrating the notion of the "pure" and universal abstract painting from the oblique angle of the periphery. I use the visual codes and conventions of abstraction—the assertion of the two-dimensionality of the canvas, the attention to the formal qualities of the painting—and yet I redeploy them in an attempt to pull them from their roots and fracture what is signified. Thus the relationship of visual referents to adjectives used by a heterogeneous group of abstract painters to describe their work e.g., sublime, tragic, timeless, relationless, pure, transcendent, religious, spiritual, is severed in my work. I reinscribe abstraction with a set of gendered meanings. The idea of self-expression through abstraction assumes a solipsistic notion of self reiterated with the artist's gesture; in my work self is assumed, in a feminist sense, as relational, and therefore gesture derives from a relational ground. I also engage directly with the notion of universality in abstraction, in order to expose a few underlying assumptions. Modernism's large debt to the notion of the "primitive," —used as critical ground for what became a marker of cultural development—makes it epistemologically problematic, if not impossible, for me to legitimately engage with abstraction in painting, since I am an instance of the "primitive" in modernism's eyes.

Post-partum Blues, Part One:

The Melanie Blocker-Stokes Postpartum Depression Research and Care Act introduced this past February (2003) meant to provide research and services for women with postpartum depression points to the inadequate existing research on Postpartum conditions. There is some consensus on categories and frequency. Current definitions outline three subgroups: "baby blues," which is an extremely common and the less severe form of postpartum depression; "postpartum mood" and anxiety disorders, which are more severe than baby blues and can occur during pregnancy and anytime within the first year of the infant's birth; and "postpartum psychosis," which is the most extreme form of postpartum depression and can occur during pregnancy and up to twelve months after delivery. Despite the fact that at least 80 percent of women in the United States suffer from postpartum conditions, the causes of postpartum depression are unknown at this time. Some of the prevailing theories include the steep and rapid drop in hormone levels after childbirth paired with socio-psychological causes such as lack of family and societal support. In my own postpartum case, the stark contrast between extended family models embroidered in childhood memories on one hand and the present limited nuclear family model from this culture on the other, became the crevice in which post-partum blues lingered.

In my post-partum blues painting series, I introduce postpartum from an oblique and nonpathologized angle; it is addressed with humor—a chorus of teething rings and blue toy truck tracks—while set in dialogue with larger questions of gender that puncture cultural boundaries.

Post-partum Blues, Part Two:
Note: All quotes are from titles of paintings.

A new series of paintings conceived post-partum: Post-partum Blues. My son's viscous umbilical cord was unexpectedly blue, a connecting blue line. I wondered whether the performance of his gender was already inscribed in the blue? how will he play? how will he groom? how will he deal with pain? But of course, performance of blue is not merely a "Guy Thing"—after all, some of most celebrated blues singers were women. And my post-partum blues had its own distinctly musical nuance, a polyrhythmic complexity that defied the clinical taxonomies of post-partum depression and baby blues.

In post-partum blues I am at play with the language of abstraction. But I am not monolingual. I indulge in the possibilities of abstract polyvocity, joining disparate languages and making strange bed partners: personal feminism and universal formalism, pixels and teething rings*, combs or toy...