a contemporary view - Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts

international exhibitions including those at the Tuggeranong
Art Centre, Greenway, Australia; the Minnesota Center for
Book Arts, Minneapolis, MN; the Wexford Art Centre, Wexford,
Ireland; the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba, Brandon,
Canada; BookWorks Gallery, Asheville, NC; Purdue University;
The University of California, San Diego, CA; and Idaho State
University, among many others.
Blanka Amezkua
Hera, 2010
5” x 5.5” (10” x 10” framed)
Intervened recycled comic book, acetone, nail markings, and nail
polish
Courtesy of the Artist
Popular and traditional Mexican culture, primarily through
the appropriation of female imagery from Mexican recycled
adult comic books, informs Amezkua’s body of work. She is
particularly interested in the comic’s reductive representation
of women’s bodies and identities. She re-contextualizes these
images by modifying their initial intention through the use of such
things as identified domestic techniques like embroidery and
crochet, or, in the case of the works in this exhibition, by using
invasive techniques and materials on the comic book pages
themselves to isolate the images and separate them from their
original context. Amezkua explores and reveals the codes and
language of Mexican pop culture, purposefully creating intensely
disembodied figures and a cacophony of dialogue. This work
celebrates the vernacular language and slang of pulp fiction
and popular culture prevalent in Mexico as well as demolishes
the sexist clichés and stereotypes in a transgressive act of
reclamation. Hera was the ancient Greek queen of all the deities;
the artist turns a pornographic image of a woman into a powerful
goddess and heroine. Astarte is the Greek name for a Goddess
found throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. She was the
goddess of sexuality, fertility, and war.
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Blanka Amezkua
Astarte, 2010
5 x 5.5” (10” x 10” framed)
Intervened recycled comic book, acetone, nail markings and nail
polish.
Courtesy of the Artist
Blanka Amezkua trained originally as a painter, studied in
Florence, Italy, and received a BFA from California State
University, Fresno. In 2007, with the help of artist friends, the
Bronx Council on the Arts, and the local Bronx community,
Amezkua began an artist-run project in her bedroom called
the Bronx Blue Bedroom Project. She has received grants
from The Department of Cultural Affairs Greater New York Arts
Development Fund, the Bronx Council on the Arts, and The
Mexican Cultural Institute in New York. Amezkua has shown
her work and projects at MoMA-P.S.1; Exit Art; The Bronx
Museum of the Arts; El Museo del Barrio; Taller Boricua; and
Queens Museum of Art, NY; MACLA, San Jose, CA; and Towson
University, in MD, among others. She recently began 3///3 ...three
walls on wednesdays... an open invitation for artists from around
the world to exhibit their work on three mobile walls that she
places in public spaces throughout the city of Athens. Her work
and projects have been discussed in the pages of The New York
Times, TimeOut, Daily News, Art21:blog, Queens Chronicle, as
well as other publications. She currently lives and works between
Athens, Greece, and New York City.