A M A T E U R M A N I F E S T O
I claim 'Amateur' as queered feminized figure of exile as transgressor on the fringe as provocative anodyne as critical knowledge seeking hedonist as legitimate illegitimate as one harbinger of the avant-garde as good imperfect citizen as one beyond specialization as inquisitor of public life as vulnerable outsider artist as anti-vocational non-knower as partial knowing polymath as intervenor of fields of experimentation as intruder to domains of practice as expert lover with expert faults as eccentric trickster as anarchist to the demands of capital as intimately engaged participant of life
Under these declarations I reclaim the title: Amateur
B I O G R A P H Y
Joan is an amateur artist and healing justice expert spawned by the Chihuahua Desert, now nascently based in Mexico City. Out of this landscape they trace the origins of their mission in life - to build resilience as a catalyst for change. They came into the world in 1992, the same year when the enigmatic Ciudad Juarez femigenocides began and the groundbreaking publication of Dr. Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery: the Aftermath of Violence -- from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror also entered the collective fabric.
This place of contradiction where wall and bridge -terror and recovery - life and death mirror each other is the site Joan intimately mines as an artist and seeker of integration. For 11 years now, since leaving the dis-membering heat of the EPTX/Ciudad Juarez borderland, they have been committed to a rigorous journey of trauma recovery that has endowed them with a multi-dimensional healing art praxis and depth of presence only embodied experience can reveal. Beside an innate haptic relationship to the world Joan reluctantly earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017 following a checkered college career. Since 2016, when Butoh dance-theater, Zen Buddhist, and natural dyeing philosophies in practice became the heart of their meaning-making process they have been intuiting an embodied resilience curriculum. Joan's holistic approach encourages dialogues with collective ruptures from the maternal source and foregrounds playful reverence for deserted, violated, and innocent objecthood.
S T A T E M E N T
Mine is a praxis driven by pressures of circumstance to blend heavy sinister realities with whimsical elements in order to make morbid real world issues more approachable. There’s a consistent interplay between fantasy and reality that resorts to symbolism, ritual, storytelling, and satire to serve as pillars for constructive critiques about the structures of society and human psychology we embody. I systematically employ the narratives of my body to serve as an intimate micro-field for the origin of complex impulses and dialogues to emerge. When I engage the creative process I become a provocateur of comfort and thrill - emotional mediums I use to encourage empowerment in personal / transpersonal attunement to a centered compass.
I believe colors and materials are alive in the voices of the symbols they resonate. In all the realms I thread with - performative, visual, textual, culinary, and healing - materially I often return to hair, food stuff, garments, nature’s ephemera, stained, worn down, and abandoned materials. Colorfully there is always red, black, white, transparent, and earth tones with the occasional explosion of vivid wild color. These symbolic visuals locate the thematic maxims I string together : the integration of obscene fragmented memories - through - the innocent desire of the feminine - through- delicate life / death cycles into a genesis of self-hood at the borderland of -into and out of -
