Andrew’s work for this exhibition is a series of paintings created by feeding visual and verbal prompts into AI to generate images of the New World. The work is the result of questions such as: What does the past look like if we try reconstructing it from both personal and collective stories? What realities can be generated when these histories are left to future technology such as AI? How familiar can these images feel and look and how truthfully can they represent the narratives collected and passed on by generations? And what relationships are formed and highlighted when past moments and memories collide with themes of the present, near, and distant future?

These works were born out of reflections surrounding Chicanofuturism, and seek to explore race, gender, science, technology, the environment, and histories accumulated on native land during pre and post-colonial times and take on tropes related to science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and surrealism. The stories generated using AI effectively reconstruct and retell histories of colonialism, displacement, labor, migration, resistance, war, and social and cultural transformation in the Americas specifically around the Southwestern regions of the United States. As Catherin Sue Ramirez states, “Chicanafuturism defamiliarizes the familiar, thereby calling attention to that which tends to be taken for granted, such as tradition and the norm.” Additionally, it reckons with the past as it rethinks the present and envisions the future of the “New World”.

Bárbara’s work deals with a body in migration. The departure from her home in Mexico to the United States has shaped how she navigates and adapts to new surroundings. Through the use of fabric, she abstracts the way her culture, language, and body conform to these environments through practices of displacement, tension, confinement, repetition, and hanging.

Miñarro works with textiles and fabrics that are personal to her. Her grandmother’s bed sheets, her mother’s clothing, her garments, and additional collected materials from women who are important to her act as signifiers of identity that she has brought with her from her homeland. In extracting these objects from their native environment and adapting them to their new surroundings they come to symbolize Miñarro’s immigrant experience. As the context of her materials is changed by their placement in a new location, they explore the idea that environments can affect identities, dictate relationships, and change the way that bodies navigate through familial spaces and abstract borders.