Elisa Garcia De La Huerta is a multi/interdisciplinary visual artist. Currently she focuses on two mediums: detailed portraiture using analog photography, and performance art based on improvisation, movement and experimental sound. The two disciplines are thematically consistent, detailing the ways in which nature interweaves with different aspects of the modern self, and post-gender politics.
She is fascinated by the Shadow of late capitalist culture, how it is fed by more or less conscious strategies of repression. Her work invokes the primal Archetype of the Goddess – Virgin, Mother, Shaman and Witch – in the belief that through a global return to the feminine in all Her aspects, we might soften our rapacious drives, creating more of a balance between our technological advancement, our relationship to nature and the refinement of our consciousness. In this context she portrays intimacy as a vital and unruly form of resilience and resistance.
Her work depends on relationships, on intuition, on critical thinking. She thrives on the ephemerality of collaboration. She revels in the poetic, tactile and pictorial aspects of analog film, the punk post-digital experience which reintroduces the more emotional, nostalgically saturated quality of the vintage format.
With the culture bombarded by an exponential number of images, she wants her work to represent a form of sanctuary, allowing a place where our connection with nature – including our bodies – might be resurrected, de-commodified, and re-beautified.
The gaze she employs is both queer and humanizing, transmitting subtle, fragile messages through the inclusion of bizarre details or punctum which allude to facets of transpersonal and eco-feminist discourse. It contrasts with the sensationalizing spectacle of mass-circulation visual media, preferring a more vulnerable language which evokes quiet reflection, relatedness, an intimacy which can be genuinely erotic that is well-known in the history of painting, but largely obscured by contemporary culture.
Credits: Collaboration with Pauli Cakes, Melanie Bonajo, Alees Yvon, Juan Donoso, Alexandra Mabes, Hex Kim
