Dante MigoneOjeda
Bio: Dante MigoneOjeda is a Latinx artist living and working in New York City. His work responds directly to the writing of Gloria Anzaldúa, in particular her book Borderlands. Through this lens, he explores issues of liminality, identity, and translation as they pertain to the Latinx diaspora. Trained as a printmaker, his work explores a variety of media including sculpture, photography and new media. He received his BFA from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, and is currently completing his MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University in New York.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: Marginalized existence requires naming as a means of owning, transforming, and creating space. Poetry, and by extension art, name the imaginary and thus create radical possibilities. My practice employs this framework, responding to the work of Gloria Anzaldúa; a formative queer Latinx feminist thinker, activist, and poet; to conceptualize and give form to an experience forged in the places between. Through a variety of media, including sculpture, photography, printmaking, and poetry, I build upon the themes in her book Borderlands, particularly her ontology of the Acquired, Inherited, and Imposed facets of identity. By probing the inherent tensions of these subject positions, represented in both my work and life by the rural landscape, urban life, and the history and traumas of the immigrant other, I create a visual language for the contingent identity of the US born Latinx. Moreover, I focus on the dialectic of rigidity and flexibility, and its relationship to codeswitching. My transformation of charged materials, such as chains, concrete, and wax, embodies this codeswitching, carving out new space for Latinx identity independent of, but in relation too, the hegemonic borders around it.
L to R: Untitled (Blossom), (20" × 28", Etching, 2019) ; Cabello (84" × 72" × 4", Chain, resin, 2019); Espina (96" × 24" × 24", Chain, resin, 2019)