HOLDING UP

About the Exhibition

We breathe in the murky volume of Southern California’s Inland Empire, where the smog from Los Angeles is trapped and held in the valley, blurring our mountains into memories. The moon is barely a moon here, and a few old crows climb into the air on wind-blown stairs. I make work about this landscape and how it still feels as if we don’t have a place to sit during lunchtime. About how my abuelita speaks only Spanish. About how for Thanksgiving we eat lasagna and tamales. About how my twin brother wears the American flag button-down my dad wore when he was naturalized and about how wind and language cross borders but sometimes people can’t. The objects I make weave among perspectives, meanings, interpretations, and identities. We use napkins that are sewn to our hands, in the shape of our hands, and our seatbelts are made of the arms of our parents telling us, “You are the only sunflower that the sun follows.”

In HOLDING UP, the belly of a paired-down church lit up by projected faces that move in sync--together their eyes follow the largest growing population of Mexicans on America’s map. Opposite and mirroring them are two outlined nuns with porcelain hands fused to ceramic corn holders; the corn’s stem as the wick of a candle. Cathedral-like windows lead to an alter of ceramic horses each holding one large corn representing a crop. Corn was first domesticated in Mexico over ten thousand years ago. Each of the ceramic hand sculptures is made to fit not dried corn, but fresh corn. Holding up our history.

The clay here also has connotations. The black clay is basaltic clay, the ancient Mesopotamian material from which most of the first human-made objects were made, so it has crucial historical importance. The red clay, Terracotta, has Pre-Columbian roots and was used exclusively until the 14th century when Europeans colonized and brought stoneware. Terracotta also has very utilitarian associations and was used for building ancient homes.

About the Artist

Anna Delgado is a Southern California-based interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation and sculpture to address ideas of belonging, multicultural identity, migration and displacement. She has studied at Idyllwild Art Academy, Kunsthøjskolen in Holbaek Denmark, and received her BA from California State University, San Bernardino. Anna was a Teaching Fellow at UNC Chapel Hill and graduated with an MFA in 2015. Her work has been included in multiple publications and exhibited throughout the US and Europe. She is Assistant Professor of Ceramics at San Diego City College.