KARLA LAGUNAS

As a multi-disciplinary artist, I  research freely and extensively allowing threads to connect and guide my work to a medium. My performance work utilizes the inescapability of my brown and female body as a lightning rod for investigations on the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, immigration, and class. My visual art often employs the use of dialectics or metaphors used to layer over complex systems to make them tangible without oversimplification. I’m driven by the potential to activate curiosity and explore how our built reality could be seen as a series of choices made in the distant past and perpetuated into the future.

Within the battles waged while our worlds caught fire, I learned to be porous. Open to the possibility of being transformed. Many aphorisms like the title of our show, SKIN IN THE GAME, become totems as I navigate the landscape of our current time. But, even these shift meaning, become their opposite. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Turn the other cheek. How to remain porous without dissolving away? What’s solid anymore? Truth is self-evident, but here we are mediating. Mediating our experiences because our truth is blurry and unfocused to those who refuse to witness us. So we must mediate with our blunt instruments of language and paint and all these mediums with the hopes of winning the hearts of the heartless. This is another stone in the river. Who knows what will ripple. I read Frantz Fanon like he wrote the bible. There is a religion in seeking understanding. I know less than I did even yesterday. But I am compelled to act despite this. We have to. I mustn’t be afraid of the ripples. I must be honest with the understanding I may never fully live authentically. No matter how much I let go. Authenticity is sincerity, but performance is artifice. Where’s my line. Line? Line, please? The medium is the message. But I tasked myself to make the big small and the small big. Do you see me? Watch as I appear.