Yadira Dockstader (b.1983) is a Mexican-American multidisciplinary artist from Southern California. She received her B.A. in Studio Art and Art History from the University of California Riverside. Dockstader works in moving image, sculpture, sound, performance, installation and hybrid modes. Dockstader seeks to expose the ableism and socioeconomic circumstances that inhibit the lives of those living with hidden disability and pain. The work’s performative and physical installation qualities bring symbolic, conceptual, material and empirical meaning, in order to explore themes around the body’s imminent travails.
Artist Location: Redlands, CA
Social Media:
PARTICIPATION
Sound of War our Bodies Store
War’s destruction of bodies aims to erase and silence. The observer carries choices remaining silent or sounds off the alarms.Research based sound recordings chronicle and serve as documentation.Sound compilation extracted from UNICEF and found recordings which explore the manipulation in news dissemination related weapons of war. Audio loops mirror and echo the relentlessness of war and its destruction.Audio and video installation serve as a conduit shifting perspectives on the human condition and ways in which death and suffering are utilized as tools. Soil and bodies interact as a cycle. War disables and extinguishes visible and invisible parts of our being. As observers, our bodies store the sound of war.
What is it in a Person Lost?
In What is it in a person Lost, the video work includes original glass harp compositions as response to 18th century ideas that hysteria in women that were based on sounds derivative of the glass harmonium.The sound compositions connect current contexts in which sound is used for bodily control. Sound and video embed pain visualization therapy methods which assist with pain management in bodies with chronic illness. In the process, pain visualization therapy is captured in the photo compositions of sculptures made with textiles that shift into representations for bodies in distress. Photos capture subtle movements of balloons and the latexed forms that are tethered to trees, using rope and wool.The culmination is a reveal of the pain visualization therapy itself as performance. Shifting perspectives of living with hidden disability and the acceptance of a body in pain.
No Transmission Medium
Performative sculpture No Transmission Medium, surrounds the social guising of illness and hidden disabilities.The materialization of these themes are presented through a sensorial process which connects artist and audience as forces without contact. The sculptural component is a stand-in, a guise, a surrogate mirroring imminent life cycles.The staging and performance reveals this encapsulation of illness and brings this friction within the act of caring for the body. Chalk pastels and contact mics adhered to wooden forms react to controlled touch but are also manipulated by the closeness of others and are reactionary to the surrounding environment. Equal to hands, a violin bow and precarious ceramic components are accessible tools for touch. Evidence remains in the materials intrinsic qualities, chalk is applied and removed through this process of sound activation until indiscernible and as momentary as bodies.
Performance October 29, 2023
at Torrance Art Museum’s Nomad II