California artist Xochitl Cahuenga-Alvarado (born in 1988 in Fresno) creates mixed media artworks and performances.
By investigating language on a meta-level, Cahuenga-Alvarado tries to grasp language.
Transformed into art, language becomes an ornament. At that moment, lots of ambiguities and indistinctnesses, which are inherent to the phenomenon, come to the surface. Ooooh, shiny!
Her mixed media artworks are an investigation into representations of (seemingly) concrete ages and situations as well as depictions and ideas of the Latin@ that can only be realized in mixed media art.
By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’, her works references post-colonial theory of Hugo Chavez as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.
Her works demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits of low-grade Pochismo and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. Bacon is often involved.
With Plato’s allegory of the cave in mind, she makes work that deals with the documentation of events and the question of how they can be presented. The work tries to express this with the Hamburger Helpers of physics and technology, but not by telling a story or creating a metaphor. So over that.
Her works focus on the inability of communication which is used to visualise reality, the attempt of dialogue, the dissonance between form and content and the dysfunctions of language. Fries with that?
In short, the lack of clear references are key elements in her work as well as the lack of clear endings of
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Cahuenga-Alvarado currently lives and works in Bubank, CA.