Beatriz Guzman Velasquez was born in the Mexican border town of Reynosa and raised at the Texas/U.S. Southwest-Mexico border in-between countries, cultures, economies and languages. As a transient body, she developed an understanding of her visual world and its potential to imagine possible alternative realities. She assembles poetic sculptures to speak on boundaries within a changing landscape. Through the use of fabric remnants as metaphorical artifacts of lived “experience,” an account of the transgressed, discarded, stained, wrongly cut, damaged and indexed communal body emerges. She then recombines these fragments to configure new images of the collected body, relating to points of time within the landscape where “bodies” become intimate and sameness is perceived. Her monochromatic planes resemble night, day and mid-points of day over land and water where boundary lines diminish.
We are proud to display Beatriz’ work in our May 2018 exhibition, CounterCulture: Hidden Stories of Chicago Past and Present.
Featured work: Rio Bravorio Grande, fabric remnants, 48″ x 60″