Cimarrón
2020 - Sculpture (Sculpture)
70 x 120 x 120 cm
Paloma Contreras Lomas
Paloma Contreras Lomas has frequently used animals as metaphors in her work. This work’s title, Cimarrón , is the Spanish word for an untamed animal, the wild vegetation that grows in the open, or a runaway slave. Cimarrón is part of a larger series in which the artist turned scaled-up Mexican hats into meticulously hallucinatory landscapes. For these soft sculptures, Contreras uses different types of fabrics and synthetic materials that are traditionally associated with femininity. These floating, ready-to-wear works exist somewhere between a miniature diorama and a theatrical prop. However, a grain storehouse or a hydroelectric plant embedded into the landscape are the main characters of what the artist calls the ‘Mexican thriller’. The industrial structures that protrude from the landscape underscore the lost promise of a revolutionary agricultural class, coexisting with the ongoing threat of neoliberal industrial exploitation. Within this context, Cimarrón appears as a rugged and velvety, sexualized scenery, referencing the Mexican landscape as both a site of political revolution and one of exploitation and violence.
A writer and an artist, Paloma Contreras Lomas has developed a practice in which literature and fiction play a major role, allowing her to address a series of topics regarding race and class that are rarely broached by a traditional Mexican society. Positioning herself as operating from a feminine condition rather than a feminist stand, the artist claims her right to confront those particular political issues that have historically been associated with male libido, such as the relationship between nationalism and the occupation and instrumentalization of territory, and the further inscription of an extractive global economy. From that perspective, Contreras’s work seems to inscribe itself as the next logical step after the 1990’s activist take of artists like Minerva Cuevas, giving a much broader context to those very same issues as she reframes them at point in (Mexican) history in which gender violence, and the voices against it, have reached a peak. The artist’s amalgamation of narrative, film, performance, drawing, and sculpture offers alternative approaches to address social urgencies from a very personal, and sometimes autobiographical, perspective. Contreras is also a part of the Mexican artist collective Bikini Wax, formed in 2011. Bikini Wax founded an artist-run space whose undertakings have been characterized by a multidisciplinary and pedagogical approach to art.
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