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aileen imperatrice self portraits
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30” x 48” This painting symbolizes a struggle I’ve had with my identity. More often than not I haven’t been completely aware of it, but there have been some key moments of awareness. One of my first jobs out of college was at a newspaper and on the same floor was a bilingual newspaper. One of the managers with whom I became friends would share with me things that were going on in the Hispanic community, different events, protests, gatherings, organizational things, great things that were going on, and I began to feel detached from my own heritage. I knew this wasn’t completely possible because I’m still who I am, a 3rd generation Mexican American, and as a result throughout my life I’ve been exposed to a lot of wonderful traditions that are true to my roots, many great experiences just in visiting with my grandparents and all my extended family. I’ve gotten a good taste of my traditional background but at the same time of course I am 100% American and am very into the Americanized life, that’s all I’ve ever known. So I’ve had that constant battle of where do I fit? How am I a mixture of the two, or am I? It’s been an interesting conflict in my own mind even as it relates within the artistic world. People feel they need to categorize you to understand what you’re doing. When I first started out people would say Oh, you’re a Hispanic artist, you do Latino art, you do art that represents your heritage. Well yes and no, I’m certainly Mexican-American and I’m sure there are influences in my work based on the experiences I’ve had and the environment I’ve grown up in, but I never specifically sought out to create only art that represented the Mexican-American experience in as much as some of the things I’ve seen other artists, my other colleagues doing, that were definitely ethnically related. There have been one or two specific exhibitions where I focused purposely on this part of me, but other than those collections, I didn’t seek out to continuously create art that only resembled that. It is interesting to me when people come up and try to categorize and I wondered if I was doing a dishonor to my heritage by not focusing on that. Or did I even know enough about my own heritage to really represent that. As I thought about it more I realized that I am who I am, and I do see, as many people point out, that my work does have that background, you can see that I am influenced by my background in both the American experience and the Mexican traditions, and so it came to a point where I was feeling that I have to recognize what I am, feel good about where I am with that, not try to even categorize myself, by trying to figure out how much percentage I am of one and not the other or whatever, going back and forth, that’s maddening and for me it’s really the fact that I recognize I am a unique mixture of those two things and so much more by everything else that I am experiencing in my lifetime, and that’s a valuable experience. Who I am, what I am at this point and how I am expressing it, all are influenced by everything I’ve gone through in my life, and makes me the artist that I am today. This painting is expressing that, the chair has roots coming from every appendage, through the arms, the tops of the chair, the legs and there’s a wonderful green vine that runs through the entire chair, the life force that keeps growing. It’s symbolizing the fact that I come from so many different roots, I have roots to continue on, and I’m continuously growing in that. Realizing and becoming comfortable with who I am, enjoying who I am and being able to express that in my work.
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© 2006 Aileen Imperatrice |
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