Artists’ Reflections

A core element of Gabriel de la Mora’s artistic output involves the conservation and restoration of artworks. He considers himself a creator of questions and explorations because each concept in a given work of art requires a specific technique that might give him control over potential variables. Resolved questions have become essential elements of his production—gateways to more complex concrete experiences. The materials are not only repositories for stories or patterns, but explorations of the durability and resilience of such. The shift from the two-dimensional nature of drawing into textures and three-dimensionality has proven an ideal space for experimentation, as he has evolved into the complexity of planning, consolidating, and assembling works of art in increasingly complex materials.

This essay highlights the conceptual and material circumstances of Kelly Kleinschrodt’s breastmilksoap (2013–14), works that are part of the ongoing project mother /cut, focusing on feminine embodied experiences (creating, nurturing, consuming), attendant banal activities (pumping breast milk, sterilizing, preparing food), and the materials she uses to reflect these experiences. Glycerin, castor oil, honey, and breast milk are cast into soap bars and contrasted with “stable” materials such as acrylic. A series of anecdotes, or “movements,” liken the re-purposing of breast milk into another “useful” state to music making. As the breastmilksoap works are exhibited, circulated, and stored, each bar continues to slowly shift and absorb its changing contexts. Each is an object that encapsulates a performance and that also performs.

This paper addresses the origins, process, and potential cultural resonances of the installation Símbolo descarnado (2013), presented at ATEA, Mexico City, in 2013, which invoked the earthly presences of the eagle and the serpent, symbols on the Mexican flag, using organic matter that was undergoing decomposition. In this approach to the image as a Warburgian force field, the work proposes viewing the material and symbolic decomposition of Mexico’s foundational legend as rendering it a formless territory whose detritus appears to whisper that another nation is possible.