Artist, Curator, Professor of Art and Art History; Mizz Conchi’s work reflects her lifetime exposure to cultural diversity and embodies her response to her bi-national upbringing. Reflecting her cultural hybridity and community, Mizz Conchi contemplates her upbringing on a Panama Air Force Base, the US and Madrid. Her work is infused by her training as painter, blacksmith and craft designer, along with her artistic beginnings influenced by her mother as an immigrant and artist. Her work focuses on an array of advocacy issues that spawn from her own personal experiences.
Artist Location: Chino, CA
PARTICIPATION
soundpedro 2021 participation: N/A
Proposed work as accepted for soundpedro 2021:
Golden Conch (sounds of silence)
Based off the Golden Ratio and inspired by Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Confessional Part VII, Golden Conch, is an intimate interactive sculpture that invites you to participate by stepping inside, either alone or with a partner and contribute your confessions.
In order for the piece to come full circle, I invite you, the viewer, to become part of the piece itself, encouraging you to set aside time for self-reflection and contemplation, anonymously or actively as a participant. The experience attempts to engage, challenge and inspire you to view confession in a new light.
As viewers enter the piece the lights inside will turn on and illuminate the piece. Viewers will speak to each other through a tube provided.
Echoes of Liquid Light
Video is available for viewing on YouTube
Or make an appointment to view in person, through November 30, 2020. All visitors will be required to wear a mask.
Some, if not all of my experiences have shaped how I create work. Previously I had worked in metals, forging and smithing the metals, manipulating it to create female centered pieces. Wanting to connect more intuitively with my audience, I left the work of woman behind. I now work in plastics, manipulating plexi the same way I would have a piece of steel. Wrapping it with clear plastic to create an environment for my viewer to engage with. Some works are wrapped with poured resin, pouring, bending, bleeding and pulling the material to into objects that will withstand the test of time. The pieces I make tap into stories of my past, experiences I have had as a bi-cultural, multiethnic woman.
I grew up in Panama on a military base and later California. As a child, I was constantly marked by my non-white identity, not belonging to anybody, not belonging to the US or Hispanic communities. A lot of my work is about visibility and identities, having people see themselves or their struggles mirrored in it much like my own visibility, being seen and unseen.
When I started thinking about this project, I kept thinking about the weight of the current social and political climate taking place in the US. The heaviness I encountered, along with my students, in this time of COVID along with the Black Lives Matter Movement. I felt a deep sadness that our country, after all of the hardships it has faced, had not created a safer space for people of color and the LGBTQ community. I wanted to make a piece to physically expel these things that had been unearthed.
This current body of work has forced me to reflect on my own experiences of bias, unearthing a voice and a wound that cannot be sterilized. The work has become multiple sculptures that reach up, twist, converge and writhe, as if to be fighting within itself, searching and reaching for hope while being pulled in multiple directions.
My work isn’t just about my experiences; it’s about my audience’s experiences. We have all been through something that links us all together and draws us to commune together in different environments. I tell my story through my art to remind all viewers that they are not alone.
Proposed work as accepted for soundpedro 2020:
Golden Shell
Based off the Golden Ratio and inspired by Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Confessional Part VII, Golden Conch, is an intimate interactive sculpture that invites you to participate by stepping inside, either alone or with a partner and contribute your confessions.
In order for the piece to come full circle, I invite you, the viewer, to become part of the piece itself, encouraging you to set aside time for self-reflection and contemplation, anonymously or actively as a participant. The experience attempts to engage, challenge and inspire you to view confession in a new light.
As viewers enter the piece the lights inside will turn on and illuminate the piece. Viewers will speak to each other through a tube provided.